


Impossible Worlds

by messageredacted



Series: Impossible Worlds [2]
Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan), Dark Knight (2008)
Genre: M/M, Surreal horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-14
Updated: 2012-01-14
Packaged: 2017-10-29 12:57:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 34,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/320128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/messageredacted/pseuds/messageredacted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are many ways in to Arkham Asylum; getting out is harder.</p><p>Now with cover art!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written on 30 June 2009.
> 
> Illustration by [Mathia Arkoniel](http://mathiaarkoniel.com/), commissioned by [tehopheliac](http://tehopheliac.livejournal.com/). Thanks for tehopheliac for giving me permission to put it in the fic!

  


* * *

  


It’s too fast to stop now.

Bruce stumbles down the hall, blindly throwing himself forward. He just has to trust that the hallway is there ahead of him, and that’s the joke in all of this—there is _no reason_ to think it will be. What are the odds now?

The air goes out of his lungs all at once and for one brief second he is hurtling through nothing, true void. His eyes scream and he slams his palms down over them, all the moisture sublimating from his mouth, and then he’s crashing to his knees on a linoleum tiled hallway that’s frosted with cold but it’s _there_ , and solid, and there is air in his lungs again. His first breath sears. His eyes water behind his palms.

It’s getting worse. That was a bad one, so truly bad that he can’t think about it. They’re running out of time.

He isn’t going to make it.

He has to trust that the Joker is ahead of him, that the Joker will see _reason_ , that the Joker will _save the world_ —

Bruce lets out a sharp bark of a laugh, startling himself. The Joker. See reason.

There is no hope.

The world shifts again.

##

**Three weeks earlier**

“There is no way he could have escaped.”

Arkham’s head of security, a balding, bulky man named Reggie Blackwell, sits in a chair in front of the board of trustees, his hands resting on his lap. His broad shoulders stretch the steel grey uniform that the prison guards of Arkham Asylum wear.

Bruce Wayne leans forward, resting his elbows on the polished wooden table. “But he _did_.”

The rest of the trustees nod, looking back and forth from Bruce to Reggie. The room is what was once a solarium in the old manor, and the hot gray skies press flat white reflections onto the table through the skylights overhead. It is uncomfortably hot but Bruce doesn’t loosen his tie.

“I know.” Reggie shifts him a look that Bruce can’t quite read. The head of security has doughy cheeks and black, glassy eyes that have little expression except for the wet gleam they catch from the overhead lights. He breathes slowly and evenly, unperturbed by the questioning.

“And you have no idea how it happened?” one of the other trustees questions into the damp silence.

“No, ma’am.” Reggie turns his head towards her. “The doors keep an electronic record of the time they’re opened and shut. His door didn’t budge at all, and there’s no other way out of the room.”

“Did you review the security tapes?”

Reggie’s gaze shifts back to Bruce. “Two hours of tape are missing.”

One of the trustees to Bruce’s right, an older man with a thick white beard, lets out a loud sigh. Bruce would smile if the revelation weren’t so irritating. “Missing?”

A slow nod. “Just static.”

“You mean someone tampered with it?”

Reggie shakes his head. “We’ve been having some problems with the cameras for a couple weeks now. They go out sometimes, then come back on.”

“Could the electronic log on the door have been malfunctioning as well?”

“We checked that the first time we had trouble with the cameras. It works fine. Nothing else is affected.”

“Could the Joker have known the cameras were out?”

“No, sir,” Reggie says calmly. “It’s never at the same time twice.”

A fly buzzes in the corner of the room, bumping sluggishly into one of the skylights again and again. The drone mingles with the faint hum of an industrial fan somewhere else in the building. Bruce’s temples throb faintly and he pinches the bridge of his nose for a second, then forces himself to fold his hands on the table again.

“Could someone have told the Joker the cameras were down?”

There is a pause. Reggie doesn’t blink but for a brief moment his thin lips settle into a moue as he considers this.

“Do you mean one of our staff?”

“Or anyone,” Bruce says impatiently.

Another pause, longer. Reggie wets his lips. The fly lands on the table, affording them a brief second of silence, and then someone waves it away and it starts circling again.

“No one but the staff knew that the cameras were down,” Reggie says finally.

“Then the staff,” Bruce says, feeling a vein in his temple throb. “Could someone on the staff have told him?”

“We keep all of the staff out of the ward while the cameras are down.” Reggie blinks once. “Safety reasons.”

“And when you went back into the ward, the Joker was gone.”

“His cell was still locked. The ward was locked down. None of the other inmates heard a thing. No way he could have escaped.”

“Without help,” Bruce interjects.

“Without help,” Reggie agrees.

“We will have to make changes to the security system,” suggests a third board member, steepling his fingers. “Get maintenance in there and fix the cameras. Keep a close watch on the inmates until we can figure out how he did it, and limit interaction between the inmates and staff.”

“We’re working on a few solutions,” Reggie says tonelessly.

Bruce flattens one of his palms on the table, feeling a drip of sweat trickle down inside his shirt. Reggie looks at him. The room is getting darker and Bruce glances up to see the gray sky thickening as storm clouds slide in. Perhaps the storms will bring cooler air, although it’s been raining for weeks now and the cooler air hasn’t come yet.

“Keep us updated,” one of the other board members says, and then everyone is standing up. Bruce looks around, startled, and then realizes that the meeting is over. Someone opens the door to the hallway and more stuffy air swirls in. Bruce pushes back his chair.

Thunder rumbles somewhere in the distance. The board members mutter amongst themselves and move to the door. Bruce gathers his papers and stands up, smoothing down his jacket, feeling sweat wick into the fabric.

“He won’t escape again,” Reggie says, still sitting in the chair across from the table. The trustees have left.

“How can you be sure?” Bruce asks. He means it to be challenging but when it comes from his mouth it sounds worried.

“That cell is foolproof,” Reggie says. “There’s no way he can escape.”

##

“I brought you a little supper,” Alfred says when the lift reaches the bottom. A whirl of warm, damp air comes down the lift with him from the shipping yard above.

Bruce rubs his eyes and stretches, leaning back in his computer chair. “Thanks,” he says tiredly. His eyes are burning from hours of staring at the screen. He taps the spacebar on his keyboard to pause the video. All of the computer screens in his array show different angles of security camera footage. Inmates freeze mid-step, picked out in grainy black and white.

Alfred sets the bag down on the table and begins pulling out a thermos. Bruce pushes back his chair and stands up, feeling his spine pop and crack.

“He hasn’t told anyone yet?” Alfred asks, pouring coffee from the thermos into a coffee mug and handing it to Bruce.

Bruce takes it and wraps his hands around the mug, inhaling the steam. It would be too warm out for coffee upstairs but in his air-conditioned bunker the warmth of the coffee is inviting.

“No,” he says. “He hasn’t told anyone who I am.”

Alfred pauses briefly in the middle of unwrapping a sandwich. “You don’t sound surprised.”

Bruce takes a sip of coffee. It’s true; he’s not that surprised. “I guess…” he begins, and then trails off.

Alfred finishes unwrapping the sandwich and puts it on a plate. “You think you two have a connection.”

“What?” Bruce laughs. “A connection? I don’t have anything of the sort with that psycho.”

Alfred smiles and sets the plate down on the edge of Bruce’s computer desk. “He gave up so that you wouldn’t have to go to Arkham. And you brought him _here_ instead of turning him in to the police.”

“I brought him here because we were handcuffed together and I couldn’t turn myself in,” Bruce answers immediately. “My extra set of handcuff keys was here. There wasn’t anything to it besides that. And I think he isn’t telling anyone who I am because he doesn’t want anyone else to know. He put out the hit on Coleman Reese for that same reason. It’s no fun for him if Batman is gone.”

“It won’t matter one way or another if he’s in Arkham, does it?” Alfred says archly.

Bruce sighs and sits back down at his computer desk. “I don’t know how he escaped, Alfred. It doesn’t make any sense. I’ve visited that ward. The walls are reinforced cinderblock. The electronic records say his door was never opened. He could have known the cameras were out if he noticed the lack of staff, but even if he knew they were out, there’s no way he could have gotten out of that cell.”

“Could someone have erased the electronic record on the door?” Alfred offers.

“That was what I was thinking. All staff was accounted for during the whole two hours the cameras were down, but maybe they could change the record remotely.” Bruce shrugs. “I don’t know if I’ll get anything else from watching these security tapes.”

Alfred sets the thermos down next to Bruce’s sandwich. “Perhaps you should get some fresh air, sir.”

Bruce puts his coffee cup down and nods. “I will in a little while. Thanks for the food.”

“You’re welcome.” Alfred heads back to the lift. “Good night.”

“Night.” Bruce takes a bite of his sandwich as the lift powers back up. As soon as Alfred is out of sight, he hits the spacebar again.

The tapes unfreeze. His eyes snap to the one he has been watching for hours—the Joker’s cell.

The Joker lies restrained for most of the twelve hours of footage he got from Arkham, staring at the wall as if it holds great interest for him. It is…strangely hypnotic to watch him watch the wall. Bruce has seen the manic side of the Joker, the feral creature that robs banks and takes hostages, but this here is the depressed side, as if all his lights have been turned out. It’s hard to feel pity for such a psychotic murderer, but he almost wishes he could give the man a magazine or something, anything to put that light back in his eyes.

Bruce’s eyes flick to the timestamp on the footage as soon as the image dissolves into static. One fifteen in the morning. The static continues for nearly two hours before abruptly snapping back to show an empty cell.

Bruce hits rewind and goes back to the beginning of the static. He has watched this section again and again, like running his tongue over the hole where a tooth used to be—something important is missing here, and he has to find out what it is to make sure it never happens again.

##

Morrison taps his nightstick against his thigh as he slowly paces the room, surveying the blank surface of the painted cinderblock walls, the linoleum floors, the tiny ventilation grate in the ceiling. He stomps his feet a couple times, listening for echoes, and then runs a hand over a crack in the wall, picking at the paint.

“So how’d you do it?” he asks.

The Joker is restrained in his cot. The straight jacket he wears is tightly strapped and his ankles are manacled together to the end of the cot. His eyes follow Morrison as he circles the room but his expression doesn’t change—a slight smile, maybe, or perhaps that’s just the way the shadows form under his scars.

Morrison finds himself studying the scars and then tears his gaze away. The Joker once killed another inmate for looking at his scars too long. True, he’s restrained, but he did escape from a locked room just last week. Morrison wouldn’t put it past the man to get out of a simple straightjacket.

“Who helped you?” Morrison continues, trying to cover his nervousness by searching more of the wall, continuing to tap his nightstick against his thigh to remind himself that it’s there. “Was it Dr. Quinzel? She looks like she would do a thing or two for ya if you asked nicely.” He throws the Joker a smile and a wink.

The Joker declines to respond. Morrison meets his gaze briefly and then turns back to the floor. Out of a locked cell, out of a locked ward, through three other locked wards and out of Arkham altogether without anyone noticing. Harding is watching from the viewing window set in the door, ready to leap into the room if Morrison needs help, but that probably wouldn’t matter. If the Joker attacks him, there won’t be a hell of a lot of time.

Thunder rumbles somewhere in the distance and Morrison glances towards the door, even though there aren’t any windows in the cellblock. God, what if they lost power? Stuck in the pitch black in the Joker’s cell, alone—

Something slaps into the side of Morrison’s head and he lets out a shriek, flinging his arms up over his head and waving the nightstick wildly. There is a whirr of startled wings and feathers burst around him. Morrison drops to a squat, covering his head. His heart thumps in his chest.

When he catches his breath again, he hears laughter. The Joker is laughing on the cot. Harding, just outside the door, is laughing as well in great whoops and snorts. Morrison raises his head and sees a bemused looking pigeon perched on the end of the cot, its feathers ruffled. It turns its head to glare at him.

“Where the fuck—” Morrison sputters, and that makes Harding and the Joker laugh even harder. Feeling his face flushing red, Morrison stalks towards the pigeon, ready to beat it to death with his nightstick if he can get close enough for a good swing.

It waits patiently at the end of the cot, fluffing its feathers. Morrison slowly steps toward it, hand outstretched.

The Joker abruptly kicks his feet. The chain pulls them up short before he can touch Morrison but the clang is loud and Morrison leaps backwards again, just barely suppressing another shriek. The pigeon flaps away, swinging around the windowless room. The Joker continues to laugh, tears streaming from his eyes.

“You shut up!” Morrison shouts, delivering a sharp blow with his nightstick to the end of the bed, narrowly avoiding the Joker’s bare feet. Harding gives a warning tap on the door. Morrison bites back his anger and fumes as the Joker laughs, and the pigeon flies in confused circles around them, looking vainly for a way out.

##

“Harleen Quinzel.”

The blond doctor whips around, looking startled, her car keys in her hand. Batman steps into the range of the parking lot floodlights. The wetlands around the parking lot are pitch dark under the heavy clouds, showcasing the flat expanse of the lot in a brassy artificial light. A frog croaks somewhere in the water, out of sight.

“I need to talk to you,” he continues.

The doctor holds up her car keys, her eyes wide. “I’ll hit the panic button,” she says.

Batman glances towards the Arkham admin building a hundred yards away. “No one will pay any attention,” he says quietly.

She glances up at the admin as well and then lowers her hand, acceding his point. She’s a pretty woman with a heart-shaped face and curly blond hair kept in a ponytail. Her eyes are startlingly blue behind reading glasses.

“I need to talk to you about the Joker.”

Her expression shifts from nervous to annoyed. “You and just about everyone else. I didn’t let him out, okay?” She leans against the door of her car, which is a rather nice looking cherry red convertible.

“Other people have been questioning you about it?”

Dr. Quinzel rolls her eyes and swats at a hovering mosquito. “They think I’m a lovesick moron but I’m _not_. I wouldn’t let a criminal out of jail. He’s sick.” Her voice when she says the word ‘sick’ is more sympathetic than disgusted.

“You’re writing your dissertation on him,” Batman prompts.

She smiles. “He’s the most interesting patient in the ward. He’s not your textbook sociopath. He has _layers_. You’ve met him. Can’t you see how charismatic he is?”

“Charismatic isn’t the word I’d use,” Batman says. Her eyes focus on him sharply.

“Just because I think the guy is interesting doesn’t mean I’m going to get myself in trouble letting him escape. If he’s out there—” Dr. Quinzel waves a hand towards the gates, “—then I can’t exactly get the inside story on his life, can I?”

A moth whacks into the hood of Dr. Quinzel’s car, then flaps away. She glances up at the spinning insects circling the light over their heads. A mosquito lands on the side of her neck and Batman resists the urge to slap it.

“Has he told you anything about his life?”

“He’s told me things.” She looks back down at him, tipping her head to the side. “In confidence, of course.”

“Of course.” Batman hadn’t expected any less from her. “You were in the staff room with the rest of the staff for the entire two hours the cameras were down, right?”

“Everyone saw me there,” she says airily. “I played cards with some of the other interns. It got pretty boring after a while.”

“Was anyone else missing from the room?”

“I think Benny called in sick that day.” She shrugs. “Everyone else was there, as far as I know.”

“Did you notice anything strange in the ward before the Joker escaped?”

“Strange?” She laughs. The laughter echoes off the pavement. “In _Arkham_? Have you ever been in the place?”

“I meant stranger than normal.”

“Strange is normal for that place, especially recently. I sit in my office and all of a sudden there’s a smell like someone’s eating an orange right next to me, or I put down a paper and it completely disappears and after I search everywhere I find it right on my desk where I left it. Once I was walking down the hall and—” She suddenly catches sight of his expression and stops. “Nothing that would help the Joker escape, no.”

“I want you to keep an eye out for anything suspicious,” Batman says. “I’ll be in touch.”

“I…” Dr. Quinzel frowns, trailing off. The frog has stopped croaking in the swamp and now they’re surrounded by a vast, echoing silence. She glances towards the pitch-blackness to her right. “…Sure,” she finishes distractedly.

Batman follows her gaze, but now that he’s in the circle of light, he can’t see a thing beyond the point where the pavement ends. Not even the crickets are chirping anymore. Their spot in the parking lot seems to have been carved out of the night and set into a void, just Batman, Dr. Quinzel and the car.

“Get in the car,” Batman says, feeling a strange chill run through him. Dr. Quinzel looks at him, her expression serious and a little worried, and then pulls open the door to her car. She slides into the driver’s seat without a word.

“You should think about pepper spray,” Batman adds.

She smiles, although he can still see the nervousness in her eyes. “I have some. I keep it in my glove box.”

Batman reaches and pushes her car door shut. As he does it, his ears register a twig snapping and then footsteps slamming on concrete.

Batman whirls around and Dr. Quinzel lets out a shriek. He gets a second to see a man’s face twisted in a grimace and then the man crashes into him, arms flailing. There is a piece of broken glass in his hand and his fingers are slippery with blood.

They both hit the ground and Batman shunts the man off to the left, sending him sprawling. The man is wearing an orange jumpsuit, the uniform of the Arkham inmates. He scrambles back from his feet and comes at Batman again, swinging wildly.

“B-b-b—” he’s saying. “B-b-bat—”

The car horn blares suddenly and Batman flinches. He can see Dr. Quinzel sitting in the driver’s seat, dialing her cell phone. The horn keeps blaring and he realizes that she has hit the panic button. The inmate doesn’t seem the slightest bit fazed. Batman sidesteps him again, grabbing his arm as he passes, and shifts his weight to the side, spinning the man around in order to slam him to the concrete and pin him there.

Except that Dr. Quinzel has opened her car door again, holding a can of pepper spray. The man’s face hits the corner of the car door. Batman feels the impact go through the man’s body and he belatedly pulls back but it’s far too late. The man sags, slumping against Batman.

“Oh God,” Dr. Quinzel whispers. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

Batman lets the man slide to the ground, gently laying him out on his back. He rips off a gauntlet and gropes for the man’s neck, searching for a pulse. Dr. Quinzel is still babbling apologies in the background but all of that fades away as he leans forward, shifting his grip, pressing his fingers against the carotid. Nothing. Nothing. He puts an ear to the man’s mouth. Nothing.

The man is dead.

Batman has killed him.


	2. Chapter 2

The man is dead.

“Call the police,” Batman tells Dr. Quinzel, his lips feeling numb. She’s watching him from the car, her eyelashes wet. When did she start crying?

She nods wordlessly, still holding her cell phone open in her hand. He can hear a tinny voice in the phone saying “Hello?” and realizes that she is already on the line with the police.

The man’s head just broke, like rotten fruit. Who knew people were so fragile? A certain amount of force applied to the right spot and that’s it. Game over.

“It wasn’t your fault,” he says, forcing the words out. She looks away from him, at the corner of the open car door where the man—where the man’s face—

The man is dead.

He was an inmate.

Batman frowns down at the bright orange jumpsuit. It says OWENS over the breast pocket, and below that, a string of numbers.

“Who was he?”

Dr. Quinzel looks down at the man, squinting into his ruined face. “I don’t know him,” she says, sounding faintly curious. She slides out of the car and squats down, reaching to press her fingers against the pulse point in his throat. For a second Bruce feels a lurch of hope that maybe she’ll find a pulse where he failed, but she says nothing when she takes her hand away.

Sirens wail in the distance. Batman takes a step back, glancing towards the gates. They’ll arrest him.

 _I am not above the law_ , he had told the Joker. _If I let you die right now, I’m taking away the chance for justice to be served. And if I do that, I’m a criminal vigilante who dresses up like a bat. And I will walk into Arkham to turn myself in._

He had meant it, every word. But this was an _accident._

He needs time to think.

“Tell them what happened,” he says, still looking over his shoulder at the gate. “Tell them what I did. I’ll—I’ll keep in touch.”

“You’re leaving?” she asks incredulously, looking up at him. He turns back to her and winces at the disappointment on her face. “But I thought—”

“It wasn’t your fault. I did it. Tell them that,” he says, stepping back again, towards the woods. “Tell them—tell them everything.”

“But—” she says.

He melts back into the shadows. She stares after him and he knows that the shadows have hidden him from her view but she keeps staring, her face frozen in surprise.

He flees.

##

The bunker is cool and empty when he stumbles in. He strips off his gauntlets and tosses them to the floor, then unlatches his mask as he drops down in his desk chair. His hair is matted to his head with sweat.

He tips back his head and stares at the ceiling, taking a breath. The ceiling glows white from the lit panels, burning into his eyes. All he can see is the man’s bloody face; all he can hear is that sudden thwack of flesh on metal. He can feel the impact in his arms. The sheer force of it.

A man is dead because of him. Yes, it was an accident. It may even be considered self-defense. But he has trained his body for years, spent so much time and effort in honing himself into a weapon. His attacker never stood a chance. Batman was wearing _armor_ , for God’s sake. The inmate had a piece of broken glass and prison-issue _pajamas_. It was a stupid, _stupid_ accident.

And now the man is dead. His mind keeps repeating that fact, and each time it brings fresh pain. Dead. He _killed_ him. Maybe if he thinks it enough times, it will deaden the horror he feels.

Any death is a waste. It doesn’t matter if the man was nobody important; if Batman didn’t _mean_ to kill him. If Batman were anyone else, he would have to turn himself in.

 _I am not above the law._

But in a way, he is above the law, isn’t he? He’s not bound by extradition laws. He doesn’t issue Miranda rights. He doesn’t need a warrant to enter buildings. When he wanted to bring justice to Gotham, he could have become a policeman or a prosecutor, but he _didn’t_. He became a vigilante because the police department was so rife with corruption that operating outside the law was the only way to bring down the criminals. He chose to be outside the law.

How many lives has he saved since becoming Batman? The entire population of Gotham would have gone insane if he had let Ra’s al Ghul accomplish his plan; two ferry boats full of passengers would have gone up in flames had he let the Joker hit the detonator. And true, maybe it’s his very existence that is bringing these kinds of terrorists to Gotham, but that doesn’t mean that they’ll stop coming if he goes to jail. Maybe he should never have created Batman, but it’s too late now. If he turns himself in, the next criminal to come to Gotham won’t have anyone to stand in the way. Is he going to put the lives of millions in jeopardy because of one accident, one car door in the wrong place at the wrong time?

Alfred will help him decide. He has spent more time in special ops than Bruce has spent being alive. The man will know what to do. Bruce reaches out to the intercom button to summon Alfred, but then he stops, his hand hovering over the button.

Bruce already knows what Alfred will say. Alfred will never tell Bruce to turn himself in. He’s too close to the situation to give rational advice. He will agree that Bruce is right; one death isn’t worth that many lives. And maybe that’s the right choice to make, but neither Bruce nor Alfred is removed enough from the situation to make that choice.

There is only one man in the city that can play devil’s advocate with Bruce.

##

Commissioner Gordon pushes his hair back from his temples and sits back in his chair, making it creak. Stretching back his shoulders, he sends a sharp glance into the shadows by the window.

“I heard a rumor that you killed a man.”

Batman steps out of the shadows, moving around the edge of the pool of light cast by Gordon’s desk lamp. “News travels fast.”

Gordon smiles faintly. “I make sure any news that involves you comes straight to me. What happened?”

Bruce hesitates. The air in the room is thick and still even though all of the windows are open. It has started raining outside and the faint swish of precipitation through dead air gives them a background hiss of white noise.

“The rumors are true,” Batman admits.

Gordon winces and his smile fades. “Don’t tell me that.”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“What happened?”

Batman glances out the windows to the plaza a handful of floors below them. It’s late and there aren’t too many people out in the rain. The rain washes the concrete a slick black. He takes a second to choose his words, trying to remove any excuses from his explanation. “I was talking with Dr. Quinzel in the parking lot at Arkham. A man—an inmate—came out of the woods with a piece of broken glass. He attacked me. I grabbed him, intending to throw him to the ground, but he hit the car door instead. He died.”

Gordon cups his chin and stares thoughtfully at the far wall. “Did you know him?”

“I had never seen him before. Neither had Dr. Quinzel.”

Gordon considers this. “What are you going to do?”

Batman lets out a breath and paces away into the shadows again. “I don’t know,” he says, letting some of his frustration into his voice. “It was an accident, Gordon, but the man is still dead.”

“You’re thinking of turning yourself in.”

“Shouldn’t I?” Batman turns to face Gordon. “I made a vow never to kill. It’s not just a whim of mine. I can’t in good conscience fight criminals if I’m going to cover up my own crimes.” He spreads his hands. “But policemen sometimes are forced to kill in the line of duty.”

“We face a review board afterwards,” Gordon returns. “There are rules and regulations that we follow. As far as the law is concerned, you’re a civilian.” He folds his arms on the desk. “And as a civilian, if this were your only crime, you would face a lenient sentence, since it was in self-defense. Dr. Quinzel’s report was exactly what you told me.”

“But this is not my only crime,” Batman says grimly. “Everyone believes I killed five men.”

“I understand your reasons for covering for Harvey. Gotham’s rebirth is based on the idea that he died a hero. If people saw what he became at the end, they would lose hope. But if you turn yourself in for this crime, you’ll be charged for everything Harvey did. That’s _not_ justice.”

“I knew what the price could be when I agreed to become the villain,” Batman says.

“I can’t let anyone be charged for a crime he didn’t commit,” Gordon says solemnly. “I _cannot_ do it. If you turn yourself in, I will have to defend you in court and tell them what Harvey did.”

“No,” Batman says firmly, planting his fists on Gordon’s desk. The leather of his gauntlet creaks. “We made a promise to keep Harvey’s name clean.”

Gordon holds out one hand. “If you fight criminals and refuse to hold yourself to the same laws, that makes you a vigilante, and vigilantism is domestic terrorism.” He holds out the other hand. “If I knowingly let you be prosecuted for someone else’s crimes for _whatever reason_ , that makes me corrupt, and Gotham doesn’t need more corruption.”

“You’re making me choose between becoming a terrorist or risking everything Harvey Dent did for Gotham?”

“Yes,” Gordon says.

Batman straightens and turns away in frustration. He looks out the window to the empty streets below. The last of the pedestrians are hurrying home, umbrellas bobbing. He touches a hand to the glass and feels the phantom jolt in his arms, the thwack of a man’s face against a metal door. He was just an inmate. No one even knew who he was. In a way, that makes it more important that he take responsibility, doesn’t it? No one else even cares that the man is dead. Someone should care. Someone should answer for it.

“I was going to retire,” he says quietly. “Harvey was going to fight for justice in Gotham and there wasn’t going to be a need for me anymore. But what Harvey became…” He stops, looking back over his shoulder at Gordon, who watches him in silence. “If Harvey had lived, I would never have covered his crimes just for Gotham’s sake. A protector who would violate the laws just for so-called justice is something that Gotham is better off without.”

“You have never been that sort of protector,” Gordon says. “You have more integrity than any man I’ve ever met. Gotham will be worse off without you.”

Batman reaches down to his utility belt and removes it, rolling it up carefully and setting it on Gordon’s desk. He takes off his gauntlets and puts them next to it.

“It’s not about me,” he says. “The man I killed deserves justice. If I’m the man you think I am, I can’t forget about that.”

Batman reaches up to his mask and unclasps it. Gordon’s eyes snap to his face as Bruce lifts the mask off his head. Gordon swears under his breath when Bruce puts the mask down on the desk.

“Bruce Wayne,” he whispers.

“I’m turning myself in,” Bruce says. Gordon slowly rises from behind the desk, his expression pained.

“You’re under arrest,” he replies.


	3. Chapter 3

Arkham Asylum is shaped like a bat in flight, body fat and furred with ivy, wings swept back and down the hill. When it rains, which is always, the head is lost in the clouds.

It took three of them to bring him into the admin, which makes him laugh because he has a hole in his gut that you could put your fist through. Sometimes at night he imagines doing just that, wondering what it might be like to scratch his back from the front. Maybe they’ve seen that urge in him. That’s why they keep his wrists locked up, the straightjacket strapped securely in place. _No escaping, Mister J, alive or otherwise._

“What do you want, Mister J?” the doctor asks him, her eyes on his. She keeps asking him to call her Harley because it shows intimacy, shows trust.

He thinks of her as ‘the doctor’.

“I don’t want anything,” he hears himself say. She tilts her head to the side, tapping her pen against her perfect white teeth. She wears makeup for her sessions, slick pink lip-gloss and glittery green eye shadow. She smells like gardenias. When she turns her head, the light from the window catches the sheen left from the expensive moisturizer on her neck and the top of her clavicle.

“Nothing? Nothing at all? Everyone wants something. Why don’t you?”

“I’m not everyone.”

“No, you’re not ‘everyone’,” the doctor says, smiling a little, her eyes going heavy-lidded as if she thinks he’s flirting with her. Or maybe she’s flirting with him. Sometimes he has trouble telling these things. “You’re not ‘most people’. You’re not even ‘one of a few’. I’ve never met anyone else like you. Why do you think you’re not like other people?”

It’s a trick. He’s heard this sort of question before. He licks the back of his teeth, tastes the fuzziness of the drug haze. There’s a jade plant in the window behind the doctor, overgrown and hunched over with its face pressed to the glass like a retarded child searching for the sun. The fragments of sky visible through its leaves are bulky and gray with clouds. Somewhere, faintly, thunder rumbles.

“Let me rephrase the question,” the doctor says into the silence, unperturbed. “Why do people desire things?”

“That’s not the right question,” he says. She doesn’t watch his mouth when he talks, like most people do. Her eyes are fixed on his.

“No? Then what is?”

“What sort of person doesn’t desire things?” He shifts in his straightjacket, feels the sour pull of stitches underneath. The wheelchair creaks. He tastes the fuzz on the back of his teeth again, feels the gaping maw of medicated white noise behind his eyes. “Everyone has desires. Babies want food. Children want attention. Adults want money, cars, jobs—”

“Love,” the doctor suggests.

He stops, annoyed. She holds up her hands in apology.

“So what’s the answer?”

“I already answered it,” he says, licking the corner of his mouth. “Pay attention.”

Her eyes flick down to her notes briefly and a faint line appears between her eyes. She has sculpted cheekbones and a perfect, pert nose. He thinks about the fat deposits in her cheeks, how you can slip a knife behind them and peel them out in perfect white pads.

“Everyone,” she says in sudden understanding. “Everyone has desires. And you don’t. You’re not everyone, you’re—” She stops, waiting for him to fill in the word, textbook perfect psychology. He understands psychology and even holds a certain respect for the basic manipulative principles behind it. Lead a horse to water and if he drinks, that’s good, and if he doesn’t—well, you’ve learned something about him, haven’t you?

“Nobody,” he says.

“No name,” she continues, aglow with the pride of her understanding. They’re _closer_ now. They _know_ each other. “No past. No desires. No fear. You are…nothing.”

The mirror upon which humanity’s face is reflected. And what an ugly face that is.

“Desires mean creation,” the doctor continues unexpectedly. The glow in her eyes—maybe that’s not pride. He reevaluates it. Fervor, maybe? It’s not that she understands. It’s that she _believes_. “People want to _find_ love. They want to _amass_ money. They want to _make_ a name for themselves. And yet _you_ —you want to _destroy_. You want to show everyone how ridiculous these desires are. You want to show them that the world is cruel and there is nothing they can do to change that.”

“Nothing matters,” he agrees, watching that glow in her eyes. Interesting. “People die. Societies fall. _Everything burns_. I show them that. The greatest ones don’t create because creation is futile. He tries to preserve Gotham but he can’t create either. He can’t have desires because everything he does is for other people.”

“Is that why you did what you did? For other people?” the doctor asks quietly.

He looks at her.

“We weren’t talking about him,” she adds.

Weren’t they? He drums his fingers against his stomach, feels the edge of the bandages through the cloth of his sleeve. Feels the wound, Batman’s fingers digging in, _I don’t think you’ve got quite the grip on reality you think—_

“You wanted to show everyone how stupid their desires were,” the doctor repeats. “You wanted to show them how futile life is, because they can’t see it for themselves. But you can. You don’t have those silly desires.”

She waits for his response but he doesn’t have one.

“You’re not nobody,” she continues. “You’re _somebody_. You’re the only person who can see the truth. The entire world is blind and only you can understand it.”

“No. I’m not the only one,” he says. He looks down at his stomach, where the wound is hidden. “There are two of us.”

She smiles because she doesn’t understand.

##

The rain is really coming down when they march him back to his cell. The administration building, the body of the beast, sits at the top of the hill. The two wings spread out and down the hill on either side, ladies’ wing to the right, gents’ to the left. Each wing is segmented into four wards, and each ward is set twenty feet out, back, and down from the ward previous. The wards are arranged so that the least violent patients are closest to the admin in ward A, while the criminally insane are farthest away, in ward D.

The elevators are ancient cages with scrolled metal gates. Harding opens the elevator and Ross pushes in his wheelchair. The newest guard, Morrison, comes in last and shuts the gate behind them. Murky light filters down from the glass skylights at the top of the elevator shaft. The thunderstorm is right above them now, turning the light pale yellow.

“The doc give you a physical?” says Harding as soon as the elevator starts to move. He’s an older man with a lot of muscle in his upper body, although his legs are the chicken legs of an old man. Ross snorts.

The Joker doesn’t answer. Ross slaps him across the back of the head. “He asked you a question, psycho.”

Morrison looks uncomfortably from Harding to Ross. He’s new to Arkham; probably new to prison work in general. He has a flat, round face which, with his short black hair and beard, makes him look like a spare tire.

“There aren’t any cameras in the elevator,” Ross says to Morrison.

Morrison shifts away from the wheelchair. “He’s escaped before,” he says, avoiding eye contact with the Joker.

“He wasn’t with three guards at the time, was he?” Ross touches his hand to the top of his nightstick.

“You might want to, ah, _listen_ to the kid,” the Joker says.

“Is that a threat?” Ross steps up close to the wheelchair and leans in, pulling his nightstick half out of its belt loop. He pushes his face in so close that their noses are almost touching. “We’re allowed to respond to threats with f—”

There is a crack of thunder and the elevator shudders to a stop. The lights flicker and go out, leaving them in a yellow-tinged darkness. The Joker lunges forward and gets Ross’s soft upper lip between his teeth, biting down hard. Ross shouts and tries to jerk back and the Joker twists his head to the side, tearing the fatty flesh. Someone’s nightstick whacks into the side of his head and the Joker momentarily goes slack.

Ross stumbles back, holding his mouth, and Harding slams the nightstick into the Joker’s head again once more for good luck. The Joker spits blood at Ross.

“Get the fucking sedative,” Harding snarls at Morrison. Morrison fumbles with an autoinjector in his pocket, then gives it to Harding, who slams it into the meat of the Joker’s thigh.

“Sweet dreams, psycho,” Harding says, and things get fuzzy after that.

##

The sedative makes things come back in fragments.

They say it’s the bat in Gotham that drags in all the crazies; before the bat, it was just a city like any city. Now the bat is here and the crazies come in; the mentally unbalanced criminals who want to try their hand at causing mayhem. There isn’t any fun in doing it when no one’s around to stop you, after all.

Or maybe it’s that like attracts like, which the Joker believes. It’s not that the bat is crazy, no—though it’s true that it takes something special to dress up in a costume and fight crime (or cause it). It’s more that he’s outside of normal; an anomaly; a freak. And when a freak is protecting a city, it takes a freak to destroy it.

There are mushrooms growing out of a crack in the far wall, at the base where the water puddles. One of them has been crushed and he can see the neon blue frill under the dull brown cap.

Destroy, create—what had the doctor said? Desires mean creation. To desire something is to give someone else power over you, because they can destroy it. If you want something, _kill it_. Then no one will be able to take it from you.

The walls of the shower room are tiled in gray and green. The room here is windowless and the two fluorescent lights set in the ceiling are greening over with slick mold. There are ladybugs crawling inside the plastic cover on the light.

Harding rips a length of tape off a roll and tapes the last edge of the plastic to his skin, covering his bandages tightly. “You have to keep the bandages dry,” Harding says to someone behind him.

His hands are cuffed to the pole overhead. Standard showering procedure here in the maximum security ward for those prisoners who are a danger to themselves and others. He doesn’t flinch when the first jet of water hits him in the back.

As long as they don’t know how he escaped, they’ll fear him, and in their fear they will abuse him so they can regain their power over him.

If he simply tells them how he escaped, they won’t believe him because they expect him to lie. They’ll beat him if he resists, but if he doesn’t resist, they’ll get suspicious. Resist a little and they think they understand him. Tell under duress and they think he’s telling the truth.

It’s a strategic retreat.

His hair turns black as it gets wet. Harding squirts industrial grade shampoo onto his head and scrubs his fingers roughly through his hair as if he’s done this a thousand times, which he probably has. Morrison moves around the front and looks a little startled when he sees his eyes open.

“He’s awake,” he says.

“About time,” Harding replies.

Morrison closes his lips and keeps going, lifting the hose to rinse the shampoo from the Joker’s hair, then chasing the suds down his body. His ribs are bruised purple where someone must have gotten overexcited with the nightstick.

“Ross got five stitches in his lip,” Harding says, his voice dark. He holds his hand out to Morrison. Morrison, after a confused pause, gives him the hose.

The Joker smiles. “It’ll make him prettier.”

Harding sprays him in the face with the house. “You sick freak.”

The Joker laughs and lets himself hang by his wrists, the metal cuffs digging into his flesh. Harding wraps the hose in a loop and then snaps it at him. The loop hits his ribs and stomach with a crack and the Joker laughs harder.

“Freak!” Harding shouts in a fury. Morrison backs away, watching with a morbid curiosity.

“Try harder,” the Joker says. “I’ve heard that one before.”

“Let me know if this one rings a bell.” Harding takes the end of the hose and shoves it against the Joker’s lips. After a brief struggle, he forces it inside his mouth. Water sputters past his lips and down his front. Harding presses his hand tight against the Joker’s mouth, around the hose, holding his mouth shut.

The Joker closes his throat against the gushing water. His mouth fills immediately and then it sears up through his sinuses and out his nose, pouring down his face. He chokes and shakes his head but Harding doesn’t let up.

“I don’t give a flying fuck how you escaped,” Harding says. “I want you to try it again so the courts decide you’re too dangerous to keep alive.”

The Joker jerks his head back and the hose scrapes against his teeth. Harding pushes it in further and the Joker swallows convulsively. The water is frigid and tastes like the sewers.

“Anything familiar yet?” Harding hits him on the side of the head, then yanks out the hose. The Joker vomits water onto the floor. “You think you’re so fucking smart, don’t you? We can see through your act, jackass.”

The Joker sucks in a breath and then Harding shoves the hose into his mouth again. The water burns as it runs out his nose. His eyes water. He sees Morrison looking away. He holds out until his lungs burn and then he finally swallows water as fast as he can to try to get a breath in. Water sprays into his lungs and he starts to choke, gagging. Harding waits another five seconds and then throws the hose to the floor.

“It was Doctor Quinzel, wasn’t it?” Harding snarls, grabbing a hold of his wet hair and shaking him roughly. “She helped you escape, didn’t she?”

The Joker coughs raggedly, spitting up water. Harding shakes him again.

“Didn’t she?”

He nods jerkily. “Harley, my Harley…”

“Or was it Bruce Wayne?”

The Joker stops.

Harding smiles and sprays the hose across his face again. “Yeah,” he says. “Bruce Wayne.”

The Joker rolls his eyes up to look at Harding. Morrison has a smirk on his face.

“Did he tell you when the cameras were out?”

The Joker clears his throat. “Bruce Wayne?”

“Maybe you just know him as Batman,” Morrison says, his smirk widening.

“You can say hello to him when you get out of solitary,” Harding adds.

“No.” The Joker shakes his head. “No, no, no, no, no.”

Morrison laughs. “They finally caught him and he plead guilty to everything.”

“ **NO!** ” the Joker howls. He lets his weight drop into his wrists and lifts his feet, planting them in Harding’s chest and shoving him backwards. Harding crashes to the ground and then scrambles furiously to his feet but the Joker is flailing, lashing out at them. “No! Not **him**. Not **here**. **NOT HIM**.”

Morrison gets too close and the Joker wraps his legs around the man’s waist, dragging him forward and bashing his forehead into Morrison’s nose, breaking it. Morrison lets out a cry and Harding takes out his nightstick and the Joker’s strategic retreat is failing but _none of that matters_ because—

Batman is coming to Arkham.


	4. Chapter 4

Arkham smells wet when they bring Bruce Wayne inside for the first time as a prisoner. It has a thick mildew smell, the kind of thing that only comes after weeks of exposure to the creeping damp. It coats his tongue when he inhales.

“Move it, Wayne,” one of the guards says, nudging him forward down the hallway. Bruce bristles but starts forward again. His feet slap the tile. His hands are cuffed behind his back. There is a guard on either side of him and a third behind him.

The hallway, lined on one side with windows looking out onto the grounds, winds through each of the wards, all the way to the admin building. The intention is that prisoners can be brought from Ward D through to the admin for sessions with the doctors without having to interact with the other wards.

The windows are behind wire mesh and are streaky with condensation. Outside, the grounds stretch out in shaggy lawns, thick and green from the rain. Bruce can see the corner of the botanic gardens at the back of the admin up the hill. Only those patients in the non-criminal wards are allowed access to the greenhouses.

They’ve shorn his head, shaved his chin, washed him with harsh soaps and, most humiliating, searched him bodily for hidden weapons. His skin feels chalky and dry from the soap. His lips are chapped. He inhales again through his nose. They reach the last set of stairs leading to the admin building and start up them. The non-slip coating on the stairs is gritty under his feet.

“Bet you’re used to coming in through another entrance,” laughs one of the guards when they reach the top of the stairs. Bruce doesn’t look at him, although he feels his fists tightening.

He knows why the air is sour: although the asylum was originally built on the Kirkbride plan for asylums, each wing set out from the next to get the maximum exposure to sunlight and fresh air, the actual ventilation system was only put in as an afterthought and was directed through the basement underneath Arkham. The air comes out of the vents with a dank, unhealthy chill. He knows this because he’s seen all the blueprints; he had researched this building when he joined the board of trustees.

He knows about the botanic gardens, which had been part of the original mansion before it came an asylum. He knows about the lack of fire exits, how the place is constructed mostly of wood and could go up in a second and take all the prisoners with it with no chance for escape. He knows how Arkham Asylum works because he once had a say in how it was run. And now he’s an inmate. Not that he has anyone to blame but himself.

They stop in front of a wooden door on the second floor and one of the guards raps on it with his fist. A small brass plaque on the door contains the words HARLEEN QUINZEL, M.D.

“Come in,” calls a female voice. The guard pushes the door open and they usher Bruce inside.

Dr. Quinzel is sitting behind a wooden desk. Her pen hovers over a notepad. She blinks up at them, adjusting her glasses, and smiles when she sees Bruce.

“Bruce Wayne,” she says. It is almost warm, but there is something in her voice that sounds smug, maybe. “Have a seat.”

It’s not a suggestion. The guards sit him down in a chair, attaching his wrists and ankles to the restraint points, and then leave the two of them alone.

The office is small and suffocatingly warm. The ceilings are high. A yellow water stain leaves a blot across one corner. The bookshelves are filled with books and other curiosities. A ceramic replica of a human skull sits on her desk, sectioned with phrenology marks. He wonders if it’s meant to be ironic.

There is a jade plant that has slowly taken over the entire window, its leaves pressed flat against the glass to drink up every inch of light. The overhead lights are off and the only light in the room comes from a stained glass lamp on Dr. Quinzel’s desk. It sends jeweled shadows across the ceiling. The only other light in the room is the small fingers of weak gray sunlight that make it past the plant.

“Can I call you Bruce?” Dr. Quinzel asks, turning to a fresh page in her notebook.

“Bruce is fine,” Bruce replies. He flexes his wrists in the restraints but knows that they have been well tested with inmates over the years. Not that he really intends to escape; it’s just habit.

“You wouldn’t prefer I call you Batman?” She tilts her head to the side.

He stills in his chair and lets his wrists relax. “I said,” he repeats calmly, “Bruce is fine.”

Dr. Quinzel nods and jots something down on her notepad. “Okay. Now, Bruce, I know we’ve met before outside of this office, but I think it may be best if we start off with a clean slate here. I want to do this for a couple reasons. First, I don’t want us to get caught up in any of the aspects of the professional relationship we had before. You are no longer on the board of trustees, so you have no say in how things work around here anymore.”

Bruce shifts in his chair and Dr. Quinzel smiles, lifting one finger gently. “I’m not saying that to be cruel. I just mean that the dynamic of our professional relationship has changed, and I don’t want any of that to interfere with our sessions.”

She hesitates, glancing down at her notebook. Bruce says nothing, his lips thin. She looks up at him again and nods once, acknowledging his annoyance. “And second, I know that Batman saw me as a suspect in the Joker’s escape, and I don’t want that to taint anything that happens here either. You are no longer Batman. Whatever happened between me and another inmate is no longer any of your concern.”

She stops and waits. Bruce bites down on his tongue and draws in a breath, then lets it out slowly.

“Fine,” he says shortly.

“Good.” She straightens and her voice turns brusque. “Since we’re starting from scratch, I want you to tell me some basic details about yourself. You’re not married?”

“No.”

“What about your parents?”

“They were married.”

She smiles blandly. “Can you tell me about them?”

“They’re dead.”

“Can you tell me what happened?”

He turns his head away. “I’d rather not.”

“Can you try?”

He sighs. “They were killed in a mugging.”

“Were you there?”

“Yes,” he bites out. “That’s not in your file?”

“It is. I’d rather hear your perspective on it.”

“We were out at the theater. I was eight. I wanted to leave early. We left and we were mugged in the alley. The mugger shot both of my parents. Then he ran away.”

“Was he ever caught?”

“Yes. His name was Joe Chill.”

“Did you think he was adequately punished?”

“He went to jail, but his sentence was suspended in return for testifying against Carmine Falcone. One of Falcone’s assassins killed him.”

“What did you think about that?”

“I wasn’t very happy,” Bruce says dryly.

“Why not?”

He stares at her. “Why do you think?”

“I try not to make assumptions.”

He hesitates, glancing down at his bound wrists. After a moment, he looks up again. “I was upset because I wanted to kill him myself.”

Dr. Quinzel doesn’t even blink. “Had you done anything to act on that?”

“Not fast enough.”

“What did you do when he was killed?”

“I went to see Carmine Falcone.”

This time she looks surprised. “Really? What were you planning?”

“I don’t know. I just…I don’t know.” He shakes his head. “I wanted to tell him I wasn’t afraid of him. He told me that I was naïve, that I didn’t understand the nature of crime. He was right. I didn’t understand how corrupt the city was. Everything was corrupt: the police, the politicians, the lawyers.”

“Is that why you became Batman?”

“What else was there to do?”

Dr. Quinzel shrugs. “There are others in this city who have done good things for Gotham. Harvey Dent was a lawyer. Commissioner Gordon is a police officer.”

“I was impatient. I needed to see immediate results.”

“You needed to confront criminals physically.”

“There are _so many_ loopholes in the law. If a policeman makes one mistake in protocol, evidence is thrown away and criminals go free. I’m not bound by those laws.”

“But isn’t that what the law is for? To protect the rights of the innocent?”

“Absolutely. But it’s nearly impossible to see criminals face justice when the entire legal system is corrupt.”

“Does that mean obeying the law matters less?”

“Of course not.”

“If a policeman can’t get enough evidence to get a warrant to search my house, then what right does he have to burst in anyway? And what right does he have to use a vigilante to do his dirty work?”

“But if you’re a criminal—”

“You need to have _evidence_ to prosecute me for a crime.”

“I didn’t prosecute. I delivered criminals to the police for them to deal with. I _never_ passed sentence,” Bruce says firmly.

She studies him. “Fair enough. So you just stopped crimes in progress. Why a bat?”

“It was meant to be intimidating.”

“When I think intimidating, I think large guns and men in jackboots. Not bat costumes.”

“I had to intimidate the kind of people who intimidated for a living. They see guns every day. But hearing rumors of a bat creature who could stop a crime without being seen was something new to them.”

“But why bats? Why not, oh, spiders or scorpions or snakes?” She tilts her head to the side. “Do bat scare you, Bruce?”

“Yes,” he says evenly. After all this time, it’s not hard to admit it.

“So you became that fear to scare other people?” She sounds a little impressed. “That’s an interesting way of doing it. I heard about the time you escaped from here with an entire swarm of bats. It was before I was working here but they still talk about it. What was that like?”

“Batman’s not afraid of bats.”

He sees her eyebrows inch up incrementally. “But _you_ are.”

“I’m not a fan.”

She scribbles something down in her notebook. “Batman’s not afraid of bats because he _is_ a bat. He is the personification of your fears, and you intended him to cause fear in others.”

“Yes.”

“When your worst nightmare is out fighting crime in Gotham, where does that leave you? Where does that leave Bruce Wayne?”

“It left Bruce Wayne sleeping with actresses and crashing cars,” Bruce says dryly.

“As all the tabloids said.”

“I couldn’t have anyone suspect that Bruce Wayne was Batman,” he adds. “I had to be as far from Batman as possible.”

“Bruce Wayne could never be Batman. And Batman could never be Bruce Wayne. Yet you managed to be both.”

“They were personas.”

Dr. Quinzel nods, turning a page in her notebook. “Describe Bruce Wayne to me.”

“He was…selfish. Arrogant. Naïve. He never watched the news. He couldn’t imagine a world outside of himself. He saw no reason to grow up. He didn’t understand poverty or need because he always had everything handed to him.”

“Did he have any strengths?”

“He was fun at parties,” Bruce offers with a half smile.

“Did Bruce Wayne mourn his parents?”

Bruce hesitates, his smile fading. “Yes,” he says slowly. “But he didn’t honor them.”

“Did Batman?”

Bruce falls silent, staring at the far wall.

“Did Batman have parents?”

Bruce looks at the doctor. She watches him intently.

“Batman didn’t come into existence to avenge your parents,” she points out. “Your parents saw justice. Their murderer went to jail. You didn’t become Batman for that. It wasn’t until someone murdered _him_ and got away with it that you became Batman. You became Batman to avenge Joe Chill.”

“That’s not true.”

“Isn’t it?”

“Joe Chill was just a desperate man. He was a symptom of what was wrong with Gotham, but he wasn’t the cause. If I really wanted to avenge my parents, I had to go to the root.”

“Do you think you achieved that?”

“To some extent. The mob was the main cause of the corruption. I helped shut down their money launderers and their drug dealers and track their cash flow.”

“Making them desperate enough to hire the Joker to take you out and the city with it.”

“They didn’t know what they were getting into with him.”

“No, but they had to fight back some way, didn’t they? Did you expect them just to roll over?”

“You think I should have just let them continue as they wanted?”

“There are other cities that have faced the mob without getting terrorists thrown at them.”

“They went after me because I was _effective_.”

Dr. Quinzel’s mildly curious expression doesn’t change but her voice sharpens. “Is that it? Or was it just a case of escalation? The police suddenly had a _ninja_ on their side who could take ten men in a fight and win and who wasn’t bound by the law. They had to get a bigger weapon. Do you think they would have hired the Joker if it was just another cop who was fighting them so effectively?”

“If it was just a cop, they could have killed him at any time. I had a secret identity. No one knew where to find me.”

“Exactly. You were more of a threat because no one knew who you were. They feared you, Bruce, just as you’d always intended. And when people are afraid, they turn vicious.”

“I stopped the Joker from killing two ferries full of passengers!”

“If Batman didn’t exist, they wouldn’t have been in danger in the first place.”

“I stopped the Scarecrow and Ra’s al Ghul from driving all of Gotham insane with fear toxin. I helped develop the antidote.”

She bobs her head. “Yes, I’ve spoken with Jonathan about this. He told me that they had to move their plan forward by weeks because of your attack on their operations. Ra’s al Ghul was forced into action. You knew the man, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“When did you meet him?”

“I spent some years traveling across Asia. I met him in Bhutan. He taught me how to fight.”

“Did he ever mention his plans when you were there?”

“At the end of my training, he told me he wanted me to lead his troops to destroy Gotham, but I refused.”

“You didn’t warn anyone about it back here? Or turn him in to the authorities?”

“I thought he had died.”

“What do you mean?”

“The man I thought was Ra’s al Ghul was an imposter. He died in a fire. The real Ra’s al Ghul was posing as a man named Ducard, and I saved him from the fire.”

Dr. Quinzel looks down at her notes again, frowning. “Tell me about the fire.”

“They were angry with me for refusing them. They attacked me. The fire was started in the fight.”

“The fire ‘was started’? Who started it?”

Bruce hesitates. “I did.”

“And the man you thought was Ra’s al Ghul died in it.”

“Yes.”

“Would you consider that murder?”

He blinks. “No.”

“Why not? He died in a fire that you intentionally set.”

“It was a distraction to help me get away. The man was a ninja who should have been aware of his surroundings. The roof collapsed on him. I didn’t kill him.”

“You put him in mortal danger and blame him for not managing to get out of it?”

Bruce is silent. Dr. Quinzel changes tack. “You said you saved Ducard? He was the real Ra’s al Ghul?”

“Yes.”

“Would he have died in the fire if you hadn’t saved him?”

“Yes.”

“Did anyone else die?”

Bruce leans forward, ignoring the question. “If I hadn’t set the fire, I never would have gotten out of there alive. I wish no one had died in that fire, but there was nothing I could do about that. I saved whomever I could. I was desperate.”

“Desperate. Like Joe Chill. But you wouldn’t excuse his desperate acts, would you?”

“I am nothing like him,” Bruce snaps. “The man died in an accident. I didn’t murder him. He insisted on fighting me instead of fleeing the fire. He didn’t even try to escape.”

“Are you saying he meant to die?”

“I’m saying it wasn’t me!” Bruce roars. “He was in the League of Shadows. He knew the risks. He had probably killed a hundred people—”

“He was a criminal,” Dr. Quinzel says. “He meant to destroy Gotham. He was trained in fighting. He tried to kill you. He could have escaped if he wanted to. I hear excuses, Bruce. I hear everything besides responsibility.”

“That’s because _it wasn’t me_!”

“Just as you didn’t provoke the real Ra’s al Ghul into attacking Gotham, or the mob into hiring the Joker, or the Joker into taking the city hostage. Do you really think Batman has been good for Gotham?”

“I am _not_ a murderer.”

“That’s why you’re here, Bruce. I’m sorry, our time is up for today.” Dr. Quinzel taps the intercom button on her desk. “Mr. Wayne is ready to head back to his cell.”

“I was protecting Gotham! Gotham would be destroyed without me! You can’t tell me that it was all my fault!” Bruce struggles in the chair as the guards enter the room and begin to unstrap him, ankles first. “Gotham _needs_ Batman!”

He sees the doctor nod to one of the guards, and then the man presses a pen to his thigh. Bruce stares at it blankly. It clicks and there is a warm pressure in his muscle, and then he’s gone.

##

“Bruce, don’t be afraid.”

Bats. Flapping wings above him—no, a man in a coat, lowering himself down a well—no, actors on a stage, performing Mefistofele—no, it’s bats, thousands of them. Shrieking, swirling, crawling like mice, _rabid—_

He’s foaming at the mouth. He rolls over to spit but he’s restrained in the stretcher, arms and legs strapped down. He’s wearing Arkham orange. Not black. Not bat. Not rabid.

He spits and his mouth tastes like chalk. The walls are glossy tile, a yellowish white like lymph. The fluorescent lights overhead, trapped out of reach behind a metal grate, seem to vibrate when he looks away. It makes things move at the edges of his vision. Or are those bats?

Maybe it’s some industrial fan somewhere in the building. Many haunted buildings can be explained away by fans or motors vibrating at a low rumble, too deep for human ears but loud enough that it jiggles the vitreous humor in the eyeballs, making people think they see things that aren’t there.

There’s no such thing as ghosts.

“Bruce, don’t be afraid,” his father says again. He wants to say ‘I’m not’ or ‘I’m trying’ but he can’t. He wants to say ‘People are supposed to be afraid of _me_ ’ but he’s a man in orange pajamas, strapped to a table, foaming at the mouth.

He spits. His mouth tastes like blood and if he stretches he can flex his fingers a little and dig the nails into the vinyl padding underneath him. He digs in his fingernails.

Fire, he thinks. The ceiling had made a cracking noise and they had both looked up. Could he have lunged forward, knocked the man out of the way? Could he have lifted the burning wood off the man after it fell? Perhaps. But why? After hearing the plans to destroy Gotham, after the swordfight in the smoldering house, the man’s vicious attempts to end his life, why would he try to save him?

He’d saved the Joker.

That was different. He had actually thrown the Joker over the ledge. Letting him drop would have been murder. But setting a fire…that’s indirect. That’s excusable.

He hears a footstep scrape in the cell behind him, out of his range of vision. He twists his head, fighting against the straps holding him down, but can’t turn enough to see.

“Have you finally learned to do what is necessary?” Ra’s al Ghul asks quietly.

Bruce writhes against the restraints, his throat closing. He stares up at the fluorescent lights.

“I won’t kill you,” he rasps back. “But I don’t have to save you.”

Ra’s al Ghul laughs richly. It reminds Bruce of nights in Bhutan, training on the glacier, sitting around a campfire to keep warm. It makes him ache briefly for his father.

“Isn’t that splitting hairs?”

Bruce licks cracked lips and tries to clear his throat. “You could have escaped.”

“How?” Ra’s al Ghul sounds amused. “Did you think I could fly? Did you think I really was immortal? That was _legend_ , Bruce.”

“Batman didn’t murder you!” Bruce’s throat sears as he yells. “Batman doesn’t murder!”

Ra’s al Ghul laughs and laughs. Bruce shouts to drown him out, spit flecking his lips, and he doesn’t even know what he’s saying anymore.

##

When Bruce wakes in the morning, his head throbs but is marginally clearer. Somehow in the night he managed to tear his wrist free of one of the restraints. His fingertips are raw. On the wall beside him, the word ‘MURDER’ has been scrawled across the tile in dried blood.

It wasn’t murder, he thinks.

She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.


	5. Chapter 5

The dining hall is constructed to provide as few opportunities for weaponization as possible. The tables, round-edged, are bolted to the floor. Stools are attached to the table and swing out for easy access. Everyone gets an unbreakable plastic tray, a cup, and a dull-tipped plastic spork, which is collected by armed guards before anyone can leave the hall.

It’s not foolproof. A spork can be smuggled, if one gets in good with the kitchen staff. The cups are of sufficient width to fit firmly into an eye-socket. The unbreakable tray can be broken with enough effort and dedication. Out of the dining hall, there are other things: a toothbrush can be melted and filed down to make a shiv. An air vent or radiator cover can be bent until it breaks, leaving a sharp edge. Even the strongest defenses can be overcome with enough time, and time is one thing everyone here has in spades.

Bruce moves down the lunch line. The linoleum floor is cracked under his feet. The walls are all painted the same shade of sickly yellow, and watery gray light comes in the window casements high up the cinderblock walls. The room smells thick and oily, as if years of grease have filmed the walls.

The inmates in line ahead of and behind him give him a wide berth. The inmates working behind the counter stare at him in open curiosity as they spoon pre-sliced boiled ham and creamed corn onto his tray.

He feels as if he’s moving in a fog. The early morning nurses came through at lights-on to dispense more medication. He doesn’t know what they are giving him but it leaves him with a strange gray buzzing behind his eyes and it makes his limbs feel almost too heavy to lift.

At the end of the line he stops and looks out across the dining hall. The tables are all mostly full, though there are a few open seats here and there. Even though no one is directly looking his way, he can feel eyes on him.

The security guards stationed around the room shift slightly when he steps into the room towards a half-full table. As he approaches it, one inmate shoves back his stool and stands up, folding his arms across his chest. Bruce doesn’t recognize the man but the man obviously recognizes him.

“The fuck you think you’re doing?” the man growls.

Bruce stops in front of him. “Sitting down,” he says without inflection.

The man reaches out and slaps the tray from his hands. Ham and creamed corn splatter to the floor.

“Find somewhere else,” the man says.

Bruce flexes his empty hands. The man glances at that and smirks, straightening his shoulders. Bruce squats down and picks up the tray, cup and spork. He stands up again.

“Okay,” he says.

Confusion flickers across the man’s face. A couple of the other people at the table snicker. Bruce turns on his heel and moves decisively for the next table. The man reaches out and spins him around.

“What, that’s it?” he asks incredulously. “Is Batman afraid of a fair fight?”

“I’m not looking for a fight,” Bruce says.

“Well you fucking found one, alright?” The man shoves his shoulder. Bruce glances briefly at the other guards, who are watching but not making any move to intervene.

He is too tired to fight. He lets the tray drop to the floor, where it clatters and spills the last of its contents. He turns and fully faces the man, letting his arms swing relaxed at his sides.

The man, looking pleased, cracks his knuckles. “That’s more like it,” he says. He drops to a crouch and circles sideways.

Bruce waits without moving. When the man lunges at him, Bruce steps smoothly aside, plants a hand on the man’s back, and drives his face into the top of the table. The man drops like a bag of cement.

There is a lull in the conversation around the room. The tables around him are silent. Bruce leans down and picks up his tray, spork and cup again. He’s not hungry anymore, but he’s stuck in the dining hall until the top of the hour whether he wants to be here or not.

He turns back towards the food line again and nearly flinches backwards when he realizes that there had been a man standing behind him. The man is only two feet away and stands slightly shorter than Bruce, with a mess of dirty blond hair and twin scars like knotted bits of rope curling up his cheeks.

“You call that a fight?” the Joker says.

The Joker steps forward and drills his fist into Bruce’s stomach. Bruce folds and the Joker’s hand comes back bloody—he’s holding the broken-off stem of a spork in his hand. Bruce gapes at it, stumbling backwards a step.

The pain slices right through Bruce’s medicated haze. It is sharp and immediate and he feels it rip right into him, shaking him loose from the grip of the sedative. In place of the gray indifference, Bruce suddenly feels rage.

He charges forward and there is a flash of something almost like grim amusement on the Joker’s face before the two of them go crashing to the ground, Bruce on top. Bruce punches the Joker twice in the face as fast as he can, and the Joker jams the spork stem into his stomach again. Bruce slams his knee into the place where he knows the bullet wound is. The Joker lets out a breath and doubles over and then they’re rolling, clawing viciously at each other, punching where they can.

They’re both bloody when the guards finally drag them apart. Bruce catches a glimpse of the Joker’s face, wild eyed and streaked with blood, before one of the guards rolls him on his stomach and cuffs him.

“ _That was a fight_ ,” the Joker shouts to him, laughing.

##

Solitary confinement is a tiny cell with a cot, a toilet, and nothing else. There is a small square window in the door that is currently closed with a metal plate.

There are no lights. When they close the door, the room is pitch black.

Bruce lies on his back on the cot. His stomach aches where the doctors removed the broken-off head of the spork. He can feel bruises forming on his face and hands. He thinks one of his teeth might be loose.

All of that is distant behind the drug haze. He feels the buzzing behind his eyes and teeth again. Whenever it starts to get overwhelming, he pushes his fingers against the wound in his stomach and feels the pain push the fuzziness away.

“Bruce, don’t be afraid,” his father whispers.

“I’m sorry,” Bruce breathes back. “I can’t help it.”

That seems to shut his father up. The room is so quiet that it’s like he’s the last person alive in the world. He can’t hear the rest of the prison. There are no guards walking by. No distant sound of metal doors clanging shut. Just his own breathing and his heartbeat, loud in his ears.

“They think you’re _crazy_ , you know,” whispers a voice.

Bruce frowns. Now that didn’t seem like his father’s voice at all. In fact, it sounded like—

“Joker?” he says out loud.

There is silence. He turns his head to the side but can see nothing but blackness.

“Who’s ‘they’?” he adds.

“The doctors.”

The sound is coming from somewhere overhead. Bruce shifts on his cot and steadies his hand against the wall, getting to his hands and knees. He runs his hands lightly over the wall.

“Well, they’re the professionals,” Bruce answers.

The voice comes immediate and angry. “ _They don’t know anything!_ ”

Bruce’s fingers touch a small metal air vent in the wall almost at the ceiling. It has been lacquered over with enamel, giving it no sharp edges. He presses his ear to the vent and he can hear someone breathing.

“But you do?” Bruce says.

Silence again. Bruce presses his hand to the bandage on his stomach.

“Why did you stab me?” he asks.

“Why did you turn yourself in?”

“Because I killed someone!”

“So?”

Bruce slides down the wall and sits cross-legged on the cot. He lets his head drop back against the wall. “I can’t let a murderer go free.”

A pause.

“You let _Harvey_ go free.”

“Harvey’s dead.” Bruce snaps.

“And not a soul in the city knows what he really did,” the Joker says in a sing-song.

“He did it because you drove him to it!” It’s not until Bruce hears the echoes that he knows that he shouted. He glances towards the door, waiting to hear a guard, but there is nothing.

“ _I_ had nothing to do with what he did.”

“You killed his fiancée and gave him a reason.” It’s too hard to say Rachel’s name. Bruce clenches his fists on his thighs, remembering the roar of the explosion, the way the flames sounded like tearing cloth when they raced down the pavement and ignited Harvey’s face.

“I gave him a gun and told him where he might want to aim. He’s the one who pulled the trigger.”

Bruce imagines the Joker lying on his back in his cot in the darkness, gesturing at the ceiling. The medication is trying to sap his anger away and leave him empty. He struggles to hold onto it.

“Harvey was a good man!” he insists.

“Men are men,” the Joker replies flippantly.

The anger’s gone. Bruce lets his eyes slip closed. There is no appreciable difference in the quality of the darkness. His stomach rumbles.

“How did you escape?” he asks without energy.

There is silence. Bruce’s anger and grief are distant things. He wonders if the Joker is listening to him breathe. He curls up on his side on the cot, suddenly infinitely tired.

“They’ll find out what Harvey did,” the Joker says when Bruce is on the verge of sleep. Bruce blinks.

“I won’t let them,” he mumbles.

“Why protect them from the truth?”

“It wasn’t Harvey that killed those people,” Bruce says, annoyed. “He was something else at the end. He only did what he did because of what happened to him.”

“Oh, poor Harvey,” the Joker purrs. “What a terrible life he led. No wonder he murdered five men.”

“It _wasn’t_ Harvey. It was _Two Face_.”

“Hmmm.” The Joker taps his fingers against the wall. Bruce can hear the sound of fingernails on tile.

“What?”

There is a pause before the Joker answers. Finally he says, “They told me you can’t tell right from wrong.”

“What?” Bruce sits up. “Who told you that?”

“The doctor.”

“Dr. Quinzel?”

“ _Thaaaat’s_ the one,” he drawls.

“That’s ridiculous.” Bruce almost laughs incredulously. “That’s so—how does she even justify saying that?”

“She says you can’t understand it when good people do bad things. Either they were _always_ bad, or they were forced into doing it.”

“People _can_ do bad things,” Bruce insists. “They do them all the time.”

“Harvey Dent didn’t kill all those people. Two Face did,” the Joker echoes him mockingly.

“You don’t understand. What Harvey became— Two Face was completely different from Harvey Dent. He was almost a different person.”

“Mmhmm.”

“It wasn’t _Harvey_ ,” Bruce says desperately. “It’s not that I’m delusional. _He wasn’t Harvey_.”

“No.” The Joker is suddenly serious. “You’re not delusional. They think you are, but you’re not.”

That stops him short. He stares into the darkness, up towards where he knows the metal grate is, his only connection to the Joker.

“They don’t understand,” the Joker continues. “They put you in here instead of prison because they think you’re crazy. They know nothing about the real world.”

“The real world?” Bruce asks.

“We’re not crazy.”

“No,” Bruce says tentatively.

“There was no patient at Arkham named Owens.”

The comment is so far out of left field that it takes Bruce a moment to figure out what he’s talking about. When it connects, he sits up. “What? You mean—the man I killed?”

There is no response.

“Joker?” Bruce stands up, putting his mouth to the grate. “Joker? What do you mean?”

All he can hear is the Joker’s quiet breathing, and nothing else.


	6. Chapter 6

As soon as the office door clicks shut behind the guards, Bruce spits out the accusation. “You’ve been telling him about me.”

Dr. Quinzel pauses in the act of opening a fresh page in her notebook. “Telling who what?”

“It’s a breach of patient-doctor confidentiality to tell _another patient_ about _my session_.” Bruce glares at her, wishing his arms weren’t restrained so he could cross them angrily over his chest.

The doctor studies him a second, then sighs. She uncaps her pen and jots something down. “He does the same thing, you know,” she says, not looking up from the notebook.

Bruce blinks. “Tells other patients about—?”

“Refers to you as ‘he’ and expects me to know exactly who he’s talking about.”

Bruce frowns, startled out of his self-righteous rage. “He talks about me?”

She gives him a tight-lipped smile. “I’m sorry. That’s confidential.”

“You told him I can’t tell the difference between right and wrong.”

Her smile flickers. “I think that’s an oversimplification.”

“But he’s right?”

“I think it’s too early to talk about any sort of diagnosis, and we’re _not_ going to discuss it yet. He shouldn’t have mentioned it.”

“Wow, isn’t it terrible when someone repeats something you told them _in confidence_?”

“Maybe you should be wondering why he told you at all,” Dr. Quinzel replies sharply. “He doesn’t do anything without a reason. He’s too clever for that.”

“Are you in love with him?” Bruce presses, annoyed.

Dr. Quinzel leans across her desk. “We’re not here to talk about _me_ , Bruce.”

“No, you’re right, we’re apparently talking about _me_.”

“You burst his stitches, you know,” she says coolly.

“And the doctors had to remove the _spork_ from my _stomach_ where he _stabbed me_.”

“There was no need to attack him. He’s still recovering from being shot, for god’s sake.”

“Did I mention the part where he _stabbed me_?”

“He doesn’t do anything without a reason,” the doctor snaps, her voice rising.

Bruce gapes at her for a second, noting the grim determination on her face. It may not be love but it’s certainly obsession of some sort. “Did you help him escape?”

She looks exasperated. “Why do you keep asking if you’re already convinced I did it? You’re a patient now, Bruce. What happens to other patients is not your concern. If you talk any more about escaping Arkham, I may have to report you as a flight risk.”

“I’m not a flight risk,” Bruce says stonily. “I turned myself in for my crime, remember? I plead guilty. I intend to serve my sentence.”

“Your sentence is life,” Dr. Quinzel reminds him. “That’s a long time.”

“I committed murder.”

“Six times. Yet you have such a problem with the thought that you may have killed that man in a fire in—where was it? Bhutan? Why do you think that is?”

“I don’t want to talk about that.”

“No?” She waits a second, then lets it slide. “What _do_ you want to talk about?”

“He told me that you said there was never any patient at Arkham called Owens.” Bruce studies her expression for a reaction.

She hesitates, frowning, then nods. “He’s right. There was no patient at Arkham named Owens. His fingerprints didn’t bring up any criminal records. His picture has been in the news but no one has come forward to identify him. His name probably isn’t even Owens. As far as anyone can tell, he doesn’t exist.”

“But where did he get the uniform? Why did he attack me?” Bruce shakes his head, trying to shake the fog away. None of this makes sense.

“Why do you think he was attacking _you_?” Dr. Quinzel asks, looking curious.

He looks at her in surprise. “Because he kept saying the word ‘bat’.”

A strange look crosses her face. “Did he?” she says slowly. “Maybe he—but no, that doesn’t make any sense.”

“What?”

She glances at him and collects herself. “Oh, it’s just some sort of ghost story they tell. The original man who turned this building into an asylum, Amadeus Arkham, believed that there was some sort of evil presence in the house that drove people insane. He thought it was a bat. We try to keep the inmates from hearing all the ghost stories but it’s impossible to stop it. Some of them get fixated on the idea…” She shrugs. “But since the man wasn’t an inmate in Arkham, it probably doesn’t have any connection at all. And we’re not going to talk about it anymore. Pick another topic.”

He sits in mulish silence. She studies him in silence as the seconds tick by.

“I can choose a topic,” she says finally.

He inclines his head. “Knock yourself out.”

She smiles faintly. “Are you involved in any romantic relationships?”

He thinks of Rachel and then forces his thoughts away from that. “No.”

“How about in the past?”

The stained glass lamp on the desk is filmed with yellow pollen and dust. Bruce wants to reach out and rub the glass clean but his hands are trapped in the restraints. “Many,” he says roughly, not looking at Dr. Quinzel.

“Could you tell me about them?”

He thinks back and lists them mechanically. “Natascha Morovna came to Gotham for a series of performances with the Russian ballet. Allison Henry is an actress who was in town for an awards ceremony. Leslie Abernathy is a model—”

“I don’t need to know all your conquests,” Dr. Quinzel interrupts with a smile. “I’m sure there are many. Let’s narrow this down to just the ones that you went on more than, say, three dates with.”

He falls silent. After a pause, Dr. Quinzel asks, “No one?”

“No.”

“Have you ever been in love?”

 _Rachel_ , he thinks. His throat tightens. “Yes.”

Dr. Quinzel rests her chin in her hand, looking thoughtful. “But you never went on more than three dates with this person?”

“I never dated her.” Off of Dr. Quinzel’s look, he adds, “She was a childhood friend. She was involved with someone else.”

“Do you think she was in love with you?”

“Yes,” he says immediately.

“Yet she was dating someone else?” Dr. Quinzel raises her eyebrows, her expression mild.

“She told me that she could never be with me as long as I was Batman. It would have been cruel of me to expect her to wait around,” he snaps, annoyed.

“She knew you were Batman?” Dr. Quinzel asks in surprise. “Did you ever tell any of the other women you dated?”

“Of course not. Rachel was…special.”

“Why did you tell her?”

“I just _told you_. She was special. I loved her.”

“She was dating someone else,” the doctor reminds him.

Realization dawns and he feels a flush of anger. “I didn’t tell her that to make her want me. She was a childhood friend. I met up with her again when I came back to Gotham two years ago. She was single then. She didn’t know I was Batman, and she thought Bruce Wayne was a—” He stops.

“She didn’t like Bruce Wayne?”

“I had to appear selfish and lazy because no one could suspect me for being Batman. She thought that Bruce Wayne was the real me.”

“He’s not?” the doctor inquires delicately.

“The _selfish persona_ that I maintained wasn’t me.”

“No?”

“Batman’s not selfish!”

“I’m sorry.” She looks apologetic. “Let me explain. You meet your childhood friend again after some time away. Your relationship had never been romantic before this point?”

“No.”

She nods. “You meet up with her and you fall in love, but you’re forced to pretend to be someone you’re not, and this woman—Rachel, you said?—isn’t impressed with you. Since you love her, you tell her who you are, but she tells you she can’t be with you while you are Batman. Did she say why?”

“She couldn’t be with someone who was so…involved in fighting crime.”

“So she didn’t like you when you were selfish, and couldn’t be with you when you were selfless. Forgive me for asking, but how do you know she returned your love?”

“She told me,” he says immediately. “When the Joker was demanding that I show everyone who I was, I really intended to turn myself in. She told me that she had meant it when we said we could be together if I was no longer Batman.”

“She wanted you to turn yourself in?”

Bruce shakes his head. “No, but that was because she knew if I was arrested, we wouldn’t be able to—” He stops, frustrated. “I _know_ she loved me. She was going to leave Harvey for me.”

“What happened?”

“The Joker killed her.”

“Wait, Harvey? Harvey Dent?” the doctor asks in realization. “You mean it was Rachel Dawes that you were in love with? The A.D.A.?”

“Yes.”

She jots something down quickly in her notebook. “I remember you throwing a fundraiser for Harvey Dent. It was in the news that the Joker had crashed the party. You did that for the man who was dating the love of your life?”

Bruce’s fists clench on the arm of the chair. “He was doing good in the city. He was making Batman obsolete. If he had lived, I no longer needed to be Batman. Rachel and I could be together.”

Dr. Quinzel looks thoughtful. “You knew that Rachel could never be with a crime fighter like Batman,” she says slowly, “And yet you tried to turn her boyfriend into one?”

“That’s not what I was trying to do at all,” Bruce says forcefully. “If I had to stop being Batman, I needed to leave Gotham in safe hands—”

“Did you think Rachel had settled for Harvey Dent since she couldn’t have you? He was only her second choice?”

“She loved me,” Bruce insists.

“More than she loved Harvey?”

“She was going to leave him for me!”

“She told you that in so many words?”

“She didn’t have to. I _knew_ she did.”

“What a choice,” Dr. Quinzel says. “On the one hand, you couldn’t stop being Batman without finding a replacement because Gotham couldn’t survive without someone like you protecting it. On the other hand, the love of your life was being forced to settle for second best because you weren’t around to be with her. How fortuitous that the man Rachel was dating was the perfect replacement for Batman. That took care of two birds with one stone, didn’t it?”

“I did not try to sabotage their relationship just for my own benefit!” Bruce shouts.

“Not just for your own benefit, perhaps, but you _did_ try to sabotage it, didn’t you?”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about!”

“You said you were going to turn yourself in as Batman, but you didn’t, did you? Not then, anyway. Harvey Dent himself said he was Batman. Why do you think he did that?”

“ _I didn’t want him to_ ,” Bruce says firmly. “He knew that he would be a target and it would draw out the Joker enough for me to catch him.”

“He _was_ a target, wasn’t he? Being such a high profile crime fighter must have been very dangerous, especially for someone who didn’t have a secret identity or a bulletproof suit like you.”

Bruce glares at her mutinously, his gaze daring her to come out and say what she’s implying. She smiles faintly.

“Did you think he might die if he became your replacement?”

“People were trying to kill him long before I came along,” Bruce growls.

“Right, someone did try to shoot him at the trial for Salvatore Maroni. How fortunate that gun jammed.”

“If he died, I couldn’t stop being Batman! Why would I want him dead?”

Dr. Quinzel frowns. “Did I say that you did?”

“Oh, don’t give me that bullshit. That’s what you’re implying. Harvey Dent chose to be the District Attorney. He knew it was dangerous. When the Joker was killing Commissioner Loeb and Judge Sorillo, Harvey Dent didn’t run away. When I planned to turn myself in, Harvey took my place, knowing it was dangerous, expecting me to save him. He never flinched away from danger. That’s what Gotham _needed_ in a protector. That’s why I chose him! He was willing to do what it took to protect Gotham! He was selfless!”

“Selfless,” Dr. Quinzel echoes. “Like Batman.”

“Exactly.”

“Selfless enough to choose Gotham over Rachel Dawes.”

“I think he would have let Rachel choose who she wanted.”

“Just like Batman would have.”

“Just like Batman _did_.”

“But you weren’t going to be Batman anymore, were you? You were going to be selfish, lazy Bruce Wayne.”

“No, that was just—I needed that in order to be Batman, but when I no longer needed to be Batman, I didn’t need to be that Bruce Wayne anymore.”

“If Bruce Wayne and Batman were both façades, then who were you going to be?”

“I’m just…” Bruce trails off. “I don’t…” He stops.

Dr. Quinzel waits until it becomes apparent that he’s not going to continue. “Batman was a parody of justice, wasn’t he? So selfless that he would let his lover be with someone else just so he could protect the city. So strong that he could single-handedly fight off all the bad guys. So pure that he loved someone he could never touch. No one else could protect Gotham like he could. He had no name and no face. He wasn’t even a _man_ , in a sense. He could fly. He drove a tank. He looked like a bat.”

She folds her arms on the desk and leans forward as she gets into her explanation. Bruce stares at her, waiting.

“And Bruce Wayne was at the opposite end of the spectrum—obscenely rich, dating supermodels and actresses and ballerinas but never spending much time with any one in particular, smashing expensive cars, throwing lavish parties. He didn’t just have a name; he had a face that _everyone_ knew. He was in the paper all the time for buying restaurants in order to behave terribly in them, running off with the entire Russian ballet, and drunkenly burning down his family mansion. You could have had a normal alter ego, but instead you went all out to be the most selfish, womanizing playboy you could possibly be. Why do you think that was?”

“I couldn’t let anyone suspect who I was. Batman was obviously someone with money.”

“Was there that much of a risk? No one had the slightest clue who Batman was. They weren’t pointing fingers at every high society man in Gotham, not even the philanthropic ones with normal lives, were they?”

“Just because they weren’t at the time didn’t mean they wouldn’t in the future.”

“True,” Dr. Quinzel says noncommittally. “Do you think your Bruce Wayne was such a jerk in reaction to how pure and noble your Batman was? It was hard to just be one or the other, but you could find some balance in being both.”

“Bruce Wayne was just an act. Everything he did was calculated to divert attention away from Batman. But Batman was—was _real_. You can’t _pretend_ to be selfless. I sacrificed things in order to protect Gotham. It wasn’t an act.”

“If Batman was who you really were, why would you want to retire?”

“For _Rachel_.”

“For a woman that you’d never dated, who was in love with someone else? You would give up being your true self for someone who may or may not even love you?”

“ _She loved me_ ,” Bruce snarls. “Stop saying she didn’t.”

“But Batman wouldn’t have stopped protecting Gotham just for love, remember? Rachel made that ultimatum and Batman chose Gotham over her, because that was the selfless thing to do. You had to stop being Batman to be with Rachel, but who were you going to be?”

“Myself.”

“And who is that?”

“The person you’re talking to right now!”

“And who is that?” she repeats.

“Bruce Wayne!”

“But not the Bruce Wayne you’ve always been. And who else is there? You didn’t leave room for anyone else. You aspired to be Batman but he was such an ideal that no one could ever physically be him. Who would you be?”

“I would figure it out! It’s not hard!”

“Isn’t it? Have you ever shown the world your real face?”

“I could if I had to.”

“Then tell me who you are!”

“I don’t know!” he shouts.

His voice echoes in the small room. He sits back in his chair, finally registering that his fists are clenched and his jaw is tight. He shakes his head and tries to relax his shoulders. Dr. Quinzel watches him, drinking in his reaction.

“That’s scary, isn’t it?” she asks quietly. “Not knowing who you are.”

“I don’t know,” he says simply, and inside he knows that’s the truth. He _doesn’t_ know how he feels. Confused, mostly.

“It must have made you nervous, knowing that you would have to give up Batman.”

“I was done with Batman.”

“Maybe it was hard being Batman, but at least you knew how to play the part.”

“I would figure it out.”

“You never even knew if your relationship with Rachel would work out. You had never been in a relationship. You had only admired Rachel from afar. You could love her and know that you had sacrificed her for the greater good as a real hero would, and you could look forward to some sunny time when your job would be done and you could have her. Except then that time came, and you were actually faced with starting a real relationship with a real woman.”

“What are you implying?” Bruce sputters. “I was happy that Batman was retiring!”

“And then Rachel died, and suddenly you didn’t need to figure out what you were going to do with your life,” Dr. Quinzel continues. “You could go back to being Batman.”

“I didn’t want Rachel to die.”

“No. I don’t think you did, at least not consciously. But it made things a lot easier, didn’t it?”

“The Joker killed her. He tied her up in a room full of explosives and he gave me the _wrong address_. I didn’t plan on saving Harvey, I planned on saving Rachel!”

Dr. Quinzel pauses at that. She tapes her pen against her mouth and her gaze goes distant. “How clever,” she says quietly. “I wonder if he knew what he was doing.”

“What?”

“He put them both in danger and gave you a choice: the love of your life, or your duty to Gotham. If either one of them died, you’d have to continue being Batman, but he couldn’t have known that. If you were truly Batman, you would have chosen Harvey Dent. But you chose Rachel.”

“Then apparently I _wasn’t_ subconsciously letting her die, was I?” Bruce mutters.

Dr. Quinzel tilts her head to the side, a gesture he is coming to loathe. “You didn’t punish the Joker for it, though, did you?”

“Revenge shouldn’t get in the way of justice.”

She shakes her head. “I didn’t say you would have killed him in cold blood. But you could have just let him fall to his death, a casualty of the fight. Instead you _saved his life_. Fine way to treat the man who killed Rachel Dawes.” Off his look, she smiles. “He’s told me about the incident.”

“Letting him die would be just as bad as killing him.”

“No one would have blamed you for it.”

“That wouldn’t make it right.”

“What about the others you killed? The reason you’re here? Their deaths don’t bother you as much.”

“I’m not going to talk about them.”

She smiles. “No. Of course not. Let’s talk about Ra’s al Ghul. The real one, this time. I know that both you and Mr. Crane have said that he was responsible for the attack on Gotham a while ago, but I don’t remember him ever being apprehended by the police. What happened to him?”

Bruce stares at her mutely, flexing his wrists against the restraints. Dr. Quinzel watches him as the silence lengthens.

“I take it we’re not talking about him either?”

“Are you going to accuse me of murdering everyone I’ve ever met?” Bruce asks her quietly.

“Is that what I’m was accusing you of?”

“Don’t be coy.”

“You want to know something, Bruce?” Dr. Quinzel smiles a little, getting comfortable in her chair. “I think the terrorist who tried to drive Gotham insane _richly deserved_ whatever he got, whether you had anything to do with it or not. I think when it comes to a situation like that one, then someone like you _should_ have the latitude to do what needs to be done to keep Gotham safe. And I think you believe the same thing, because in nearly every situation, you have done exactly that. Except for one.”

“I didn’t let him die because _Batman doesn’t kill_.”

“I don’t know where you’ve been, Bruce, but I’m pretty sure we’ve already established that he does.”

“ _I am not a murderer_.”

“Tell me, Bruce—do you keep repeating that to yourself so you won’t have to think about some _other_ reason you may have saved the Joker?”

Bruce’s mouth shuts. He stares at her blankly. She waits in expectant silence, watching him.

“Pardon?” he says finally.

“Of everyone in Gotham, the Joker was the only one who gave you a reason to stay Batman, wasn’t he? You saved the Joker as a _reward_.”

“I think our session is over,” Bruce replies.

##

His heart is still beating abnormally fast when the guards take him out of Dr Quinzel’s office. They didn’t sedate him this time and he almost wishes they had.

The wood of the third-floor hallway creaks under their feet as they march down the halls. The white paint on the ceiling is peeling down is curls, showing yellow paint underneath.

“She chew you out over your fight?” the guard named Jones asks him.

It takes him a second to think back that far. He blames the medication. “Yeah.”

“Didn’t know if you would do it,” Ross adds. He’s got five stitches in his lower lip that stick out like barbed wire. “Without all your armor, you know?”

Bruce’s mouth twists and he doesn’t answer.

“Don’t get me wrong. It was a good fight. I liked seeing that asshole get his face pounded in.” Ross grins at him, an expression made ugly by the stitches. “Bet you could take just about anyone here in a fight.”

They reach the first winding staircase and start down. Bruce doesn’t resists as they manhandle him around the curve of the staircase.

“You interested in earning a few privileges?” Jones asks quietly.

“Privileges?” Bruce asks warily.

They emerge at the downstairs hallway where a man in a white lab coat is standing outside of an office, unlocking it. The door is marked KLAUS WILLIAMS, M.D. He nods to them, his eyes flickering curiously to Bruce.

“Bruce Wayne,” he says with a slow smile. “It’s nice to meet you. Not under these circumstances, I suppose…” He laughs, his mouth a slash of white in the middle of his thick red beard.

Bruce gives him a tight smile, his face feeling like wax. The doctor seems amused at his lack of a response. He nods to the guards and opens the door to his office, stepping inside. Bruce catches a glimpse of machinery on a desk before the door closes behind the man.

“Step quickly or he’ll call you in for one of his sessions,” murmurs Ross under his breath, urging Bruce forward again. Jones laughs darkly. They step out into the foyer and then begin towards the set of stairs that leads to Ward A.

“Yeah, privileges,” Jones repeats in a low voice, picking up the thread of the earlier conversation. “As in a day off meds.”

Bruce turns his head to look at Jones, who grins at him.

“This isn’t official, is it?” Bruce asks, voice dry. The guard shrugs noncommittally. They move past a hallway and something catches Bruce’s eye.

He turns his head sharply, catching just a bare glimpse as they move past it. There’s someone lying on the floor of the hallway. She’s flat on her back, her throat smiling at him like a second mouth, clotted with dark blood. Then she’s out of sight. Bruce goes rigid.

“Wait,” he gasps, pushing back against the guards. “Go back—” He plants his feet on the floor.

Ross opens the stairwell door, looking faintly irritated. “Downstairs, Mr. Wayne,” he says.

“She’s in trouble,” Bruce says, twisting in the guard’s grip. “She’s down that hall—”

Jones and Ross exchange a glance. Jones begins to fumble for his autoinjector.

Bruce stops struggling, letting himself be pushed forward towards the doorway. “She was in the hallway we just passed,” he says, craning around to look over his shoulder. “She was covered in blood. If we just back up, you’ll see her. _Please_.”

“Fine,” Jones says. He glances at Ross and then they move back down the hall a few feet to the mouth of the hallway.

The hallway stretches empty, wooden floors polished to a high shine. At the end of the hallway is a small barred window letting in segmented rectangles of white light. There is no girl. There is no blood.

“Where is she?” Jones asks patiently in the voice he must use to talk to all of the patients.

Bruce stares, his mouth hanging open. _Bruce, don’t be afraid,_ he hears his father say in the back of the head as his blood runs cold.

Jones nods to Ross and they begin moving Bruce towards the doorway again. This time he doesn’t resist.

##

They come for him some time after the lights go out.

Time in the asylum is strictly regimented into blocks of forty-five minutes, with ten minutes of passing time in between. When the bell rings at the end of passing time, you had better be at your destination, and have to stay there until the next passing time. The final passing time is at nine p.m., by which point everyone must be in their cells or else.

It’s maybe ten p.m. when Bruce hears the cellblock doors open and footsteps come down the hall. It’s too early for the next bed check. He sits up when they stop outside his cell.

“This one,” he hears a voice say. It sounds like Reggie, the head of security that he last saw at his final board meeting. His door clanks open. Silhouetted in the lights from the hall, he sees Jones and Ross.

“What’s going on?” he says, his voice echoing inside the cell.

“Shh,” Ross says, coming into the cell, holding the manacles they use to transport prisoners to counseling. “We talked about this earlier, remember?”

Bruce stands up warily. Ross stops a few feet away, suddenly looking concerned.

“Jones,” he says. Jones moves into the room.

“We told you about earning privileges, right?” Jones says. “If you come with us, you don’t have anything to worry about.”

“And if I don’t?” Bruce asks.

Ross shrugs. “Our violent patients get two days of heavy sedation. But I don’t want to have to do that. I have money riding on this.” He holds up the manacles. “Just come with us.”

Bruce stands still and doesn’t react when Ross closes the manacles over his wrists. When Ross and Jones lead him into the hallway, he looks down to where some other guards are negotiating at another cell. He recognizes the bulk of Reggie, who has his back to him, as well as two other guards that he’s less familiar with—Harding and Morrison. Harding has rather nasty bruising around his eyes and nose, probably from a broken nose.

After lights-out, the hallways are lit by only single bulbs spaced ten feet apart, giving the halls thick shadows pooled in the corners. The cells are marked with last names and numbers. Bruce automatically glances towards one cell as they pass it—marked NAME UNKNOWN. It is too dark in the cell to see if it is occupied.

They reach the main hallway, pass the dining hall and then reach the staircase that leads to the showers. The stairs are slippery with condensation. When Jones pushes open the door at the base of the stairs, there is a burst of noise.

The showers are filled with inmates, guards and interns. The noise echoes off the wet tile walls, redoubling on itself into a thousand tinny echoes. Bruce stops dead in his tracks.

The center of the room has been cleared of people and a rough circle has been marked out in blue painter’s tape. Two inmates, stripped down to gray prison-issue boxers, circle each other in the ring.

The rest of the inmates stand around the edge of the room, cheering on the fight. The jingling of chains makes Bruce glance down, where their ankles have been chained together in groups of five. Guards stand clustered in the doorways, tasers on their hips, watching the fight.

One of the inmates in the ring lunges at the other and Bruce hears the wet thud of fist on flesh. This fighting isn’t trained or organized; it’s bare fists and unskilled flailing. Blood is streaming down one inmate’s heaving flanks. The inmate gets in a good punch and the other drops, accompanied by the roar of the crowd.

“Cigarettes,” says Jones, ticking off his fingers. “A paid day off work, though you haven’t even started work yet. Credits for the store. A day off meds. Your choice if you win.”

A guard clangs his nightstick on a pipe to signal the end of the fight. Bruce watches the winner limp over to the guard, who hands him a pack of cigarettes. The guard is vaguely familiar as someone he’s seen in the lunch room, and Bruce thinks his name might be Verrick.

A few of the guards exchange cash—bets, probably. Verrick glances back towards them and nods to Ross, then looks down at the list in his hand.

“Next fight: Wayne versus Schiff,” he announces.

A murmur sweeps the room and heads turn and people begin to realize who Bruce is. Jones unlocks Bruce’s shackles.

“The orange comes off,” Ross says, unbuttoning the collar of Bruce’s uniform. Bruce pushes his hand away.

“I’m not fighting,” he says.

“The fuck you aren’t,” Ross says. “You know how much money I have riding on this? Reggie thinks you’re a weak little pretty boy who got a lucky break with Amos in the lunchroom. You’re going to let him keep thinking that?” He unbuttons the front of Bruce’s uniform and pulls it off his shoulders, exposing his gray undershirt.

Bruce looks around the room. All of the faces are turned to him, waiting. He recognizes Jonathan Crane and Carmine Falcone along with countless other faces that he has personally put in Arkham. Thomas Schiff clambers into the ring. In his gray boxers, he is scrawny, his ribs visible under taut flesh.

Bruce will break him like a twig. It’s ridiculous that they even paired them up.

“I’m not fighting,” Bruce says again. He keeps searching the crowd but the Joker isn’t there. Perhaps he’s still injured from the other fight.

“Two days heavy sedation,” Ross hisses. “You won’t even know your own name.”

They’re watching him, desperate for the fight. Win or lose, it doesn’t matter. They want to see his blood. But that’s not what will happen. He will break Schiff. In a bare fisted fight, he would break anyone here. As much as he hates the meds, he refuses to beat someone to a paste to get off them.

“Three days,” says Ross, his face tight with anger. He must have bet a lot of money.

“I’m not fighting,” Bruce says again. Ross makes a sound of disgust and reaches for his taser. Jones holds up a hand.

“A deal’s a deal, Ross,” he says with a smirk. “Pretty boy won’t fight. Pay up.”

Ross swears and roughly snaps the manacles back on Bruce’s wrists. Bruce lets it happen, turning his face away from all the staring eyes. _Batman doesn’t fight for his own gain_ , he thinks. _And neither will I._


	7. Chapter 7

“Bruce, don’t be afraid,” Ra’s al Ghul says.

 _Why not?_ Bruce wants to ask, but his lips are glued shut with dried spit. _What’s wrong with being afraid?_

“To conquer fear, you must become fear,” Ra’s al Ghul replies as if he isn’t listening.

He can’t tell what time it is—can’t tell if the lights are on or off. He’s pretty sure there are insects in his pillow, because he can hear them clicking and scraping but then he realizes it’s his teeth grinding together. He muscles feel clenched. His back hurts. He can’t wake up.

Has it been a day yet? Has it been three? Have they forgotten about him entirely and are they leaving him here, strapped to the cot, IV drip drip dripping into his veins until his sentence is up?

“You saved the Joker as a reward,” Dr. Quinzel tells him.

It wasn’t a reward. He loved Rachel. He would have done anything for her. He would have died in her place if he had to. He would have ~~killed~~ — No.

He listens to himself grind his teeth, hearing the squeak and grind until he realizes that it’s a beetle caught in the window frame, one spindly leg poking out from the wire mesh. It taps against the glass, trying to find its way inside. The sky on the other side is gray.

It wasn’t a reward. The Joker wanted to prove that everyone was corrupt, and if Batman had killed him, that would have proven his point. Batman had to save him and show that there were still some people left that upheld the letter of the law. If the Joker hadn’t forced him to prove this point, ~~he would have~~ — No.

He listens to the insect tap against the glass until he realizes that there are no windows in the cellblock. There is no insect; it’s just the whine of the vent overhead. It wafts damp air over his face, the smell of turned earth and mold. He imagines it running through the narrow basement level, past the shower room, the laundry room, and up the pipes to pour out into each cell. He wonders if the Joker is breathing in the same air.

It wasn’t a reward. The Joker wanted to die. ~~It was a punishment.~~

##

One foot, then the other. Then the first one again. Then the second. It’s a complicated pattern. He keeps forgetting.

He woke up at lights-on in the morning with the feeling that he had been gone for a while. He felt shaky and sweaty, as if he’d had a fever that had broken. At first bell, he stayed in his cell, and it was only ten minutes before Jones came pounding at his door.

“You’re scheduled for work today,” Jones told him. “Get up.”

And so he’s walking, or mostly anyway. It seems a little absurd to him that he’s going to have to work, considering how much money is in his bank account, but of course he has no access to that here. Here he can earn twelve and a half cents an hour, which he can spend in the shop for underwear and candy bars.

They stop at the doors to the laundry rooms and Jones pushes them open. He says something to one of the guards on duty, then turns and leaves. Bruce frowns vaguely after him.

The air in the room presses wetly against his face, and his first breath feels like damp cotton has been shoved into his mouth. Sweat pricks up on his body. Large industrial driers run on one side of the room, while inmates load washing machines on the other. There are still washing tubs here, left over from older times, although they still appear to be in use. All of the laundry from the entire men’s side of the asylum is done here.

“You’re down there,” the new guard says, pointing towards the washing machines. “They’ll show you what to do.”

Bruce moves through streamers of fog as if he’s in a dream. Two inmates are washing sheets in a tub of suds and water. Four more are loading washing machines with mesh bags, each one filled with dirty clothes and stitched with the number of the inmate to whom it belongs. There’s another man at another tub, washing more sheets.

Eyes turn to him as he approaches. One inmate’s lips quirk up. “Back from your vacation?” he says.

He looks towards the piles of mesh bags full of dirty clothes. “What do I do?” he asks, his tongue like a piece of lead in his mouth. It hits him distantly that he was meant to react to the inmate’s comment, but he doesn’t care.

The man grins. “Wash the piss-covered sheets from the vegetable ward, why don’t you?” He waves a hand at the far tub.

It takes a few seconds to get his feet to move again. He shuffles past the washing machines and the first tub, then stops next to the second tub, where one inmate is working in silence. The inmate’s head half-turns to him when he stops next to the tub.

“What do you need me to—” Bruce stops short when he sees the scars.

They stare at each other in silence for a moment, the Joker still working, pushing the sudsy sheets against the washing board, then turning them over and pushing them down again. It is methodical, repetitive work that is so foreign to Bruce’s mental image of the Joker that he is almost convinced it’s someone else.

The Joker says nothing, and so after a moment, Bruce tears himself away and goes to the pile of dirty laundry. It stinks of piss and worse things. He takes a sheet from the top of the pile and moves to the washing board opposite the Joker.

There was a time in a prison in Bhutan when Bruce had to do his own laundry like this, using the water from a spigot in the yard. It is surprising how easy it is to get into that rhythm again, imagining the chilly wind on his cheeks and the cold mud under his knees. That cold mud would be a welcome change from the heat in this room. His uniform is soaking through under his armpits and down the center of his back.

For a few minutes, he can feel the other inmates stealing glances at him, surprised that he even knows how to do laundry at all. But after awhile they all get into the rhythm of things and attention shifts away from him.

“Where’s Peterson, anyway?” one of the inmates mutters, hefting two mesh bags and tossing them into the washing machine. “He usually does the sheets.”

“Maybe he was transferred to another job,” another inmate replies, measuring out detergent.

Bruce keeps his head down, folding the sheet over. Suds foam up between his knuckles. His fingers are slick with the detergent. His uniform is slowly but surely soaking through with the sweat from his body and the steam from the hot water.

“Naw,” says a third inmate, pausing with a mesh bag in his hand. “I heard them drag him from his cell screaming last night.”

The Joker tosses his sheet into the rinsing tub. His hands are pruned with the water and his fingernails are clean and white. Bruce remembers the fight on the rooftop so long ago, remembers the greasepaint caked into the creases in his hands.

“Why?” the first one asks.

“Something about the walls closing in, all the doors disappearing.” The third inmate shrugs. “Guess he just snapped.”

“Old man Arkham up to his old tricks,” says the second one with a snort.

“You believe that?” the first one asks. “Ghosts? Really?”

“Why not? The guy’s wife and daughter were killed in the house, and the guy tortured the murderer to death right in the asylum. Don’t you think his ghost would continue to torture the murderers who are stuck in here now?”

“No such thing as ghosts,” the Joker says.

They’re the first words the Joker has spoken since Bruce arrived. He looks up and sees that the Joker is looking right at him.

The other inmates fall into an uneasy silence and get back to work. The Joker continues to stare at Bruce. Bruce can’t tear his eyes away.

“You didn’t fight,” the Joker says, his voice so quiet that Bruce doesn’t think the other inmates can hear him.

Bruce shakes his head, looking down at the stained sheets in his hand. He pushes it against the washing board, feeling the muscles in his arms tremble, still weak from the medication.

“You think they want your mercy?” the Joker asks.

“I’m not going to hurt people to get what I want,” Bruce tells the washing board.

The Joker laughs out loud and Bruce senses the other inmates looking over. He glances up and sees them look quickly away. The Joker is still looking into his face.

“You think they deserve to go without medication more than you do?” The Joker is unblinking. Bruce doesn’t know how he knew what Bruce would have chosen as his reward from the fight, but it’s not really that surprising.

“They’re the crazy ones, right?” the Joker says quietly.

The Joker’s eyes look dark from here but Bruce remembers the swamp green of them in the fluorescent light of his bunker.

“I see things,” he says quietly. “Things that aren’t there.”

The Joker continues to watch him, his expression stilling into something that Bruce can’t read.

“That doesn’t mean you’re crazy,” the Joker says. He leans forward, his hair hanging in wet curls. “ _I see them too_.”

Curtains of steam rise from the water between them, making the Joker seem fuzzy and indistinct. The other inmates finish loading the washers and move to the end of the row where the first of the washers has finished its cycle. Bruce can hear the squish slide of the inmates washing sheets in the other tubs. His uniform clings to his skin with the damp.

“Why did you save me?” the Joker asks.

The answers that Bruce came up with seem so distant now that he can’t voice them. He looks down at the sheet he’s been washing and can’t remember if it’s the same sheet he started with. Is he still in his room, dreaming?

The curtains of steam shift, giving him a moment of clear sight. The Joker’s neck is shiny with sweat and the lights gleam off his throat when he swallows. In another time and place, maybe he would want to dig his thumbs into the place where his pulse beats in his carotid artery— maybe it would be his _duty_ — but here he doesn’t need to do that. He can just kneel here and wash this sheet over and over again and they don’t need to fight anymore.

##

“Everyone develops their ideas of good and bad at around the same age.” Dr. Quinzel leans back in her chair, one hand ghosting out to gesture with her explanation. Bruce follows her pink fingernails, where they seem to leave trails of glistening pink in the air. “But sometimes, due to some trauma, people can revert back in this stage to a previous level in the process.”

He doesn’t say anything— in fact, hasn’t said anything since he arrived. If he doesn’t say anything, maybe the good doctor won’t whisper his secrets in the Joker’s ear. Maybe the Joker won’t have the upper hand. Or maybe he just doesn’t care anymore.

“A patient who has suffered this trauma only believe in absolutes: people can be good or bad, but they can’t be both. The patient can’t integrate the two. If someone does bad things, they are irredeemably bad. If they do good things, they are perfectly good. If a person does both, they seem to be split into a good half and a bad half— for example, Harvey Dent and Two Face. Jonathan Crane and the Scarecrow. Bruce Wayne and Batman.”

 _Ducard and Ra’s al Ghul_ , Bruce thinks despite himself.

“Everyone is good and bad at the same time, Bruce. Even me. Even you.” Dr. Quinzel steeples her fingers in front of her chin and stares at him. “When you’re Bruce Wayne, where does Batman go? When you’re Batman, where’s Bruce Wayne?”

##

“Master Bruce.” Alfred’s expression softens into relief when Bruce sits down across from him.

The visiting room is filled with long benches that are bolted to the floor. Alfred is sitting stiffly on one of the benches by the door, his back straight, hands on his knees. Bruce guesses that Alfred probably got the same list of rules that he just did: no sitting with legs crossed, no hands in pockets, no touching, no hugging.

“Alfred,” Bruce says, forcing a smile onto his face. “It’s good to see you.”

Alfred smiles, looking sad and tired. “You’re looking well,” he says. Bruce knows him well enough to know that he means it, but Bruce doesn’t think he can return the compliment. Alfred is looking older than he did when Bruce saw him last.

“How are things going?” Bruce asks.

“As smoothly as can be expected. Mr. Fox is handling the company admirably. The stock took a hit when the news about you went public but it looks like the company will survive.”

“Good.” Bruce studies Alfred. “And how are you doing?”

“Perfectly fine, sir,” Alfred says with a burst of good humor. “I’m just keeping things running until you get back.”

Bruce’s smile flickers. “Alfred…”

Alfred gives him a sharp look. “You’ll be back, sir,” he says. “Commissioner Gordon has been making a case for your release.”

Bruce feels himself go very still. “Is he telling them about Harvey?”

Alfred nods soberly. “I believe so.”

“He can’t do that. He can’t tell them about Harvey. He can’t betray Gotham like that.” Bruce shoves to his feet, ignoring the way the guards turn their attention to him.

“He’s an honest man. He won’t let you get punished for something you didn’t do.” Alfred holds his palms up, trying to placate Bruce. “Even if they drop the murder charges, you’ll still be in Arkham until they decide you’re mentally sound. Pleading guilty to five murders you didn’t commit isn’t exactly—” Alfred hesitates.

“Tell him to stop what he’s doing,” Bruce says in anguish. “Tell him—tell him we made a promise to protect Gotham. What is Gotham going to do?” Bruce clenches his hands into fists.

Alfred’s voice is firm. “I expect Gotham will have to grow up, sir.”

##

The dining hall is tinged yellow with the start of a thunderstorm boiling up outside. Bruce finishes his unidentifiable dinner at a table with strangers who pay no attention to him. When the end of dinner bell rings and everyone gets in line to turn in their utensils, one of the inmates in line behind him laughs.

“No stab wounds this time, huh?”

Bruce ignores it. An inmate ahead of him turns back.

“Nah, that psycho is with Doc Williams,” he says.

The inmate behind him snorts. “What did he do to deserve that?”

“I heard that’s why Owens took off,” the second inmate says conspiratorially, handing his utensils to the guard. “Couldn’t take Doc Williams anymore.”

Bruce lifts his head. “Did you say Owens?” he says in surprise.

The inmate glances back at him blankly. “Yeah?”

“Owens was a patient here?”

“He was until he escaped last week.” The inmate turns away from him and heads out the double doors. Bruce hastily gives his utensils to the guard and follows him.

In the hallway, he looks around into the sea of orange until he spots the inmate heading down the hall for the library. Bruce moves after him as quickly as he can without breaking into a run. The guards will stop him if he runs.

“Wait,” he calls. “I have to talk to you.”

The inmate turns back, looking annoyed. “What the hell do you want?”

“Tell me about Owens,” Bruce says. “They told me he didn’t exist.”

“Why do you even care?”

“He’s the reason I’m here!”

The inmate pauses, looking confused, and then slowly horrified. “You killed _Owens_?” he says in growing shock.

“Tell me who he is,” Bruce insists. The inmate starts to back away and Bruce grabs his arm. “ _Tell me_.”

The inmate jerks his hand away and then turns and runs into the library. The doors swing shut behind him. Bruce strides after him, shoving the doors open.

What hits him first is the smell, the sickly sweet stench of it. Bruce stops dead.

There are no bookshelves or reading tables here. Rows of cots stretch the length of the room, nearly all of them occupied. IV bags hang from poles. A nurse turns her face towards him, looking surprised. At the far end of the room, a door slams shut.

A patient in a bed nearest him turns over. His face is scaled with raised round pustules, and his eyes are so crusted over with them that he can’t open them. The other patients are like this. They’re all like this.

Bruce takes a step back.

 _“That doesn’t mean you’re crazy,” the Joker says. “I see them too.”_

He needs to get off this medication.


	8. Chapter 8

The shouts of the inmates vibrate condensation of the walls of the showers. Water mists the air, turning the air into fog, coating every surface in a hard gloss. Bruce’s skin gleams in the fluorescent light and his gray boxers cling to his thighs with the wet of it.

The Joker stands across from him, shoulders hunched, hands hanging down at his sides. His torso is tightly muscled, skin pale and hard as candle wax, nipples like copper pennies. A snarl of dark hair trails down from his bellybutton to the top of his boxers. The bandages have been removed, leaving an angry red scar twisting under his ribcage where he was shot. He is watching Bruce with dark eyes, completely ignoring the noise of the inmates around them.

It’s too loud and echoing to even hear what they’re saying, but he thinks he hears the word _Batman_.

The tiles under his feet are slick where Jones hosed away the blood of the last fight. Bruce widens his stance, bare feet slapping the tile. The cracked plastic casings of the fluorescent lights overhead are crawling with ladybugs, which flit down to cling to the Joker’s shoulders like crawling drops of blood. Bruce brushes one away from his face.

Verrick bangs his nightstick on the pipes and the fight begins.

Bruce steps sideways and the Joker mirrors him. They circle slowly, eyes on each other. Bruce keeps his arms loose, his weight on the balls of his feet, waiting for an attack. The Joker seems momentarily content to circle, his eyes never leaving Bruce’s, a smile playing around the edges of his lips.

Inmates slap the wet tile with bare hands, urging the two of them to get on with it. Bruce pays them no mind. He is not going to be rushed into this. This is a fight to gain him temporary freedom from the medication, he knows, but it is also something bigger than that. Him versus the Joker, hand to hand, no knives or armor in sight. The last time he had an actual fight with someone without armor or weapons was in the prison in Bhutan, before Batman, and then he had anger to guide him. Now he has nothing but the fuzz of medication.

They have inscribed a full circle on the floor, reaching the place where they started, when Bruce takes a deep breath, pulling wet air into his lungs. He shifts his weight slightly, seeing the Joker’s eyes flick to his closed fist.

He lunges forward then, slamming his weight to the side when the Joker dances away. Bruce steps inside the Joker’s stance and jams his fist into the Joker’s ribs, avoiding his bullet wound, before darting back out of reach.

The Joker springs at him without waiting to recover, the side of his hand finding the crook of Bruce’s elbow before Bruce even realizes he’s within range. Bruce’s right arm goes numb and he leaps back to avoid the second hit. The Joker pursues, punching stiff fingers into Bruce’s diaphragm.

Batman feels the air leave his lungs, and as it leaves, the anger comes. He shoves his body forward, swinging a foot to plant it behind the Joker’s knee, and uses his momentum to knock the Joker backwards, sending him flailing to the floor.

“There you are,” the Joker laughs breathlessly.

He drops down on the Joker immediately, pounding his fist into the Joker’s jaw before the Joker knocks his hand away and jerks forward, ramming his forehead into Batman’s eye socket. Batman recoils, startled at the reminder that he is not wearing a mask.

Joker hooks an ankle around the back of Batman’s knee and rolls the two of them over. Batman feels the hot bulge of his eye swelling. He twists to the side to avoid the Joker’s fist and is suddenly aware of the Joker’s thighs clamped on his hips.

The Joker takes advantage of his pause to pound his knuckles into Batman’s cheekbone. Batman swings his arm up and grabs a fistful of the Joker’s hair. He drags the Joker’s head down and bites.

The Joker pulls away, lips curling up, and blood splatters Batman’s face. Batman pushes the Joker off of him and slams his head into the floor. The Joker goes momentarily limp, his legs releasing from Batman’s hips. Batman climbs to his feet, staggering a little.

The sound clicks on in his head and Bruce suddenly realizes that the inmates are roaring, that they haven’t stopped. Verrick is counting, but the Joker is already stirring, rolling to his knees. Batman lets him get up, although he knows that the Joker would never have done the same for him.

The Joker straightens. His chin is red with blood, his lower lip already swelling from Batman’s bite. A thread of blood is winding its way down from his hairline. He grins, his teeth red.

Batman can feel his eye swelling shut. His right arm is still tingling from the Joker’s first hit. It is clean pain, the sort of pain that clears his mind. He waits for the Joker to attack.

This time the Joker doesn’t hang back. He charges Batman and at the last second drops to a crouch, sweeping Batman’s legs out from underneath him. Batman crashes to the floor but rolls immediately out of the way before the Joker can leap on him. He bounces back to his feet and lunges, grabbing the Joker around the waist and slamming him bodily to the floor.

He straddles him, plants one hand in the center of the Joker’s chest among a series of small pink burns and rears back to punch him in the face. The Joker grabs the wrist planted on his chest and holds on. Batman’s fist comes down.

The Joker goes still underneath him. He hears Verrick’s voice begin to count. He gets slowly to his feet, swaying. His knuckles throb. Bruce blinks at the inmates around them, their mouths opened in a roar but their voices a distant hum.

 _When you’re Batman, where’s Bruce Wayne?_

##

He’s sick in his cell afterwards, spewing stringy vomit into the toilet. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and thinks about the Joker underneath him, mouth split wide and red with a laugh.

He remembers the small pink burns on the Joker’s chest under his hand. Fresh burns. The inmate earlier had said the Joker was with Doc Williams. Bruce can’t think of any valid treatment that would leave marks like that, and it makes him want to pull on his costume and go sneaking into the doc’s office and find out what he’s doing. But he can’t. He’s a prisoner now. He can’t protect the citizens of Gotham, or even the inmates of Arkham.

Footsteps tramp down the hallway outside his cell. Bruce looks up, drying his hands and face on a towel. His eye throbs. He crosses the cell to the door and peers out the eye slit.

Ross is bringing the Joker down the hall. The Joker glances sideways at him as they pass. Bruce meets his gaze without flinching. The Joker grins at him but doesn’t say a word.

He watches until Ross takes the Joker out of sight, hearing the door clank shut at the end of the hall, before he turns back to his cell. Without the medication, the walls seem harder. He lifts himself up onto his toes and then lets himself drop forward into a pushup. His muscles remember the moves, even if they aren’t at their peak. He does pushups until sweat drips from his nose to the floor and his arms tremble with exhaustion.

To figure out what’s going on, he needed to win that fight. To win that fight, he had to beat the Joker. To beat the Joker, he had to _hurt_ the man, and hurting the man for his own benefit was not something he ever wanted to do.

 _You think they want your mercy?_ the Joker had asked him.

 _It doesn’t matter whether they want it or not_ , Bruce tells the floor between his palms. _It’s my responsibility to give it._

He remembers the Joker on top of him, thighs squeezing his hips.

Bruce rolls onto his back and begins his sit-ups, arms crossed over his chest. His abs bunch and release. He closes his eyes and focuses on the slide of muscle under skin.

He remembers the Joker grabbing his wrist and staring up at him, waiting for the blow to fall.

Bruce pauses in his sit-ups, staring unfocused at the far wall. The Joker had let him get in that final blow at the end. He hadn’t resisted.

The Joker had thrown the fight.

 _I would have won anyway_ , Bruce thinks angrily, falling back into his sit-ups with renewed vigor.

He wishes, suddenly and with startling intensity, that he knew the Joker’s real name.

##

The dining hall has a new clarity when he enters it for breakfast. It smells like cooking grease and curdled milk. The floor is firm under his feet. He has greater peripheral vision. It’s almost as if he has woken from a dream and can see things for the first time.

An inmate spoons oatmeal and eggs onto his tray and Bruce fills his cup with lukewarm coffee. He takes in the details of the inmates around him as he moves to an empty table. There is Peterson, the obsessive compulsive arsonist; Doug, who killed all of his children so his wife wouldn’t get them in the divorce; Amos, who beheaded his neighbor because his music was too loud, and who tried to fight Bruce in the dining hall that first day. Falcone— Bruce turns and looks after Falcone as he heads to a table. Is that a round white pustule on his neck?

No. It can’t be. He must be mistaken.

Bruce sits down and digs his spork into the eggs. Or the oatmeal. It’s hard to tell which is which. It tastes bland and unsalted. He coats his tongue with it and lets it slide down the back of his throat, looking around the room.

Three tables away he sees the Joker eating breakfast. The man’s cheek and lower lip are bruised and he is eating slowly, his eyes on his tray. Bruce can’t decide if he wants to catch his gaze or not, so he looks away.

The sky out the windows is dark, boiling gray and Bruce can hear thunder beginning far off behind the sound of the dining hall. It’s going to be a big storm.

And then, with the sound of an exhaled breath, the room changes.

Light suddenly floods across Bruce’s knuckles, so bright that he squints, jerking his head up. Stark sunlight punches through a ceiling studded with rotted holes, dappling the tables and floor with a pattern of blinding light and deep shadows. The floor under his feet is crumbled and black with decay, and the tables are covered in debris from the ceiling.

The sky, straight up, is endless blue, and there is the feeling that there is no one else left in the entire world.

In the beginning moments of panic immediately afterward, the noise seemingly swallowed up by the expansive void around them, Bruce turns his head towards the Joker’s table. The Joker is staring straight at him, drinking in his reaction with focused eyes. His expression seems to say, _do you see it too?_

The room is abruptly normal again, but it is a fragile normal in a way it wasn’t before. The panic continues around them, but Bruce continues staring at the Joker, unable to look away.


	9. Chapter 9

The mood in the dining hall is ugly as the storm arrives. Bruce can see uneasy looks passing between inmates. To his right, one inmate bumps another and the two start glaring at each other.

“Everyone back to your cells,” Morrison calls from the doorway, his nightstick bare in his hand, his shoulders square. “No work today.”

“Back to our cells?” one of the inmates says in outrage. “We just came from there!”

“And it’ll be solitary for you if you don’t obey,” Morrison says with a note of warning in his voice. The bell for passing time rings and the line of inmates moves sullenly for the doors. The light through the windows is yellow from the arriving storm, and a crack of thunder shakes the building.

The hallway is filled with a sea of orange-uniformed inmates heading back to the cellblock. Bruce is pushed against the wall by the flow of people. He puts out a hand to brace himself and notices that there is a long, thin crack moving from the base of the wall all the way up to the ceiling. He hasn’t spent too much time looking at the walls of the hallway but he’s pretty sure the crack is brand new, based on the white powder of plaster that has drifted to the floor.

The tide pushes him along and he continues down the hall. For a second, before he enters the cellblock, it almost seems as if there are more inmates in the hallway than there are in the whole ward, but then he’s through the doorway and heading for his cell and the feeling disappears.

Bruce paces in his cell for ten minutes until he hears a commotion in the hallway. He heads to the eye slit and peers out. There are three guards clustered around Crane’s cell.

“I didn’t do it!” Crane is protesting, struggling against the restraints as they bundle him up to take him away. “I had nothing to do with that! Search me! Search my cell! I don’t even have that fear toxin anymore!”

“Enough,” Harding says in annoyance. Crane flails out an arm and someone captures it. Bruce hears the click of an autoinjector and Crane sags.

Bruce has no idea what did cause whatever happened this morning, but he knows it wasn’t Crane. He knows Crane’s drugs, and that wasn’t it.

In any case, Crane wasn’t around back when Bruce saw the girl murdered on the floor, or when he saw the pandemic ward in the library. There has to be some other explanation, although right now the only explanation he has is that he really is delusional.

They guards bring Crane away. A couple minutes later, Ross arrives.

“Time for the doc,” he says cheerily, banging on the door. The stitches have been removed from his lower lip and he seems happier with Bruce now that Bruce has actually fought in the ring.

“Where’s Jones?” Bruce asks, going to the middle of the room and turning around, his hands on the back of his head. Ross comes in and shackles him.

“Went home sick,” Ross says in disgust.

“Is he?” Bruce remembers the pustule on Falcone’s neck.

“Nah. He’s freaked about the fear toxin.” Ross snorts. “Says it’s ghosts.” He lets go of Bruce’s shackles and turns him around.

“It’s not fear toxin,” Bruce says.

Ross gives him a sidelong glance. “I think he’s been around the crazies too much.”

They move out into the halls and start towards the first staircase. The halls are completely empty now.

“Why isn’t there work today?” Bruce asks.

Ross glances at him and doesn’t answer, but Bruce can figure it out for himself. Jones must not have been the only one who went home sick.

They arrive at Dr. Quinzel’s office and Ross leads him in. It is surprisingly clean in the office, and Dr. Quinzel is sorting papers on her desk.

“Belated spring cleaning?” Bruce asks as Ross straps him into his seat.

“Just straightening up,” she says with a smile. “I’m taking some vacation time.”

Bruce sees Ross roll his eyes before he leaves the room. Dr. Quinzel doesn’t seem to notice.

“Why?” Bruce asks.

She shrugs. “Just needed a break.” She folds a paper in her hand and tries to tear it in half but the paper is so damp from the humidity that it won’t tear. Sighing, she tosses it into the trashcan.

“Is it because of what happened this morning?”

She glances over at him. “I heard about that. People are wondering how Crane did it.”

“He didn’t,” Bruce says.

Dr. Quinzel raises her eyebrows, glancing over at him. “No?”

“I know his fear toxin, and that wasn’t it.” He watches her, waiting for a reaction. “Besides, it’s not the first time people have seen things that aren’t there in Arkham. You said it yourself. Remember? You said strange is normal for Arkham.”

“Have you been seeing things, Bruce?” Dr. Quinzel stops sorting the papers entirely and peers at him.

“Has the Joker told you?”

Dr. Quinzel’s expression goes strange. “You’ve been talking to him?”

“Once or twice.” Bruce frowns at her. “Why?”

She shakes her head, going back to her papers. “I think we should go back to what exactly you’ve been seeing.”

Bruce studies her. “You’ve been telling him about our sessions but he hasn’t been telling you anything,” he says in realization. He watches her cheeks turn pink.

“He doesn’t tell me every detail of his life,” she snaps.

“Did he tell you about the fight?”

She stares at him blankly. “In the dining hall?”

Bruce hesitates, thinking of the burns he saw on Joker’s chest during the fight. “Did he tell you anything about Dr. Williams?”

“I know he’s been seeing Dr. Williams,” she replies airily. “Klaus will be taking over my patients while I’m away and he wanted a session to get to know the Joker before I left.”

“Did he tell you what went on in that session?”

Her expression sours. “We’re not here to talk about the Joker,” she says.

Bruce subsides, content to let it rest for now. Obviously the Joker hasn’t been telling her anything about what’s been going on.

Dr. Quinzel throws a few more papers into the trash can with more force then necessary, then folds her hands on her desk. “Tell me about these things you’ve been seeing.”

Bruce leans back in his chair, the restraints tight around his wrists. “The roof of the dining hall was gone this morning. It was like we were in a different world. I can’t think of any explanation for it.”

“But you don’t want to think it was the fear toxin?”

Bruce leans forward. “Have you seen anything weird here? Things you can’t explain?”

Dr. Quinzel hesitates, then apparently decides to humor him. “I heard a woman screaming a couple weeks ago. I thought it was one of the patients from the women’s wing coming in for an appointment, but I didn’t see anyone around, and it was after hours.” Her eyes focus somewhere on the far wall and she shudders a little. “It was such terrible screaming.”

“But you didn’t see anything?”

Dr. Quinzel stands up and puts the rest of her papers back in a filing cabinet. “Well, I was tired.”

Bruce waits in silence, watching her back. She fiddles around with the filing cabinet for a bit.

“I’ve probably been listening to too many of those ghost stories,” she says to the filing cabinet.

“The ones about Amadeus Arkham?” Bruce asks quietly.

“Yes.” She closes the filing cabinet but continues to stand there.

“What did you see?”

“I didn’t see anything. It was a—a hallucination or something. I was working late, and the screaming sounded so terrible that I just—” She turns to the jade plant and picks up her watering can, shaking it to see how much water is in it.

Bruce waits.

“There was a dollhouse,” Dr. Quinzel says abruptly. “It was in one of the visitor rooms downstairs, on the floor. Of course we don’t have any dollhouses in there.”

“A dollhouse,” Bruce echoes.

Dr. Quinzel puts her hand to her mouth. “There was a woman’s head inside,” she says, her voice muffled.

“You think that was related to the stories of Arkham?”

She turns back to him, her hand still on her mouth. She looks spooked. “That was what happened to his wife. The killer put her head in a dollhouse, and he cut the daughter’s throat. At least, that’s what the stories say.”

“How old was his daughter?”

“I don’t know. Six? I don’t remember.”

 _Her throat was cut_. Bruce thinks of the girl he saw in the hall. There isn’t such thing as ghosts. It is so impossible to even be thinking about this.

“But I have an overactive imagination,” Dr. Quinzel says, making an obvious effort to push away her unease. “It wasn’t there when I brought a guard back to see it. I was just tired, you know?”

“What do the stories say, exactly?”

“Amadeus Arkham turned the family house into an asylum after his mother committed suicide. He lived here with his wife and daughter until one of the inmates from the State Psychiatric Hospital escaped and murdered them both while he was away on business.” Recounting the story seems to calm Dr. Quinzel down, and she sits back down at her desk. “He treated the murderer at Arkham for a full year before the man died of a ‘malfunctioning’ electroconvulsive therapy treatment on the anniversary of the murder. Arkham was admitted to his own asylum seven years later.”

“Why was he admitted?”

“For trying to murder his stockbroker. He was obsessed and delusional. He spent months trying to find a way to bring his wife and daughter back from the dead. He was convinced there was some way, whether through magic or time travel or alternate universes or whatever. He spent a lot of his fortune on different devices and books to help him. When he finally realized it was impossible, he had a nervous breakdown.”

“Do you believe in ghosts?”

She laughs a little. “I wouldn’t say that I do, but…” She shrugs. “I guess anything’s possible. What did you see?”

“I saw a six year old girl with her throat cut.”

Her smile disappears. She looks down at her bare desk. “Did you really?”

“I think something’s going on.”

“But what about the dining hall ceiling?” she asks, putting her hand on her chin. “That part of the building has been in continuous use since it was built.”

Bruce considers this. It’s true—even if he did believe in ghosts, it wouldn’t explain the roof. “Has Arkham ever been used as a hospital? Or a temporary ward during some sort of disease outbreak?”

“Not that I know of. I don’t know of any major epidemics in this area since the Spanish Flu in 1918, and that would have been while Arkham was still a family home.”

 _It wasn’t the flu_ , Bruce thinks. None of this _is_ making sense. Maybe he is delusional. Maybe this is all some symptom of a mental illness he didn’t know he had.

Dr. Quinzel glances at her watch. “Dr. Williams wants to meet you. We’re going to head downstairs to his office now. I wish we could talk some more but I really have to get out of here.” She stands up and moves to the door, opening it and leaning out. “Ross?”

Ross comes in and removes Bruce’s restraints. Dr. Quinzel accompanies Bruce and Ross out of the office, her bag on her shoulder. She locks the door to the office behind herself.

“You’re my last patient for the next two weeks,” she says as they walk down the stairs. Thunder cracks out the window at the end of the hall. “I hope you and Dr. Williams are able to get along.”

Bruce says nothing. He is certainly interested in meeting this man, after what he’s heard. At the bottom of the stairs, Bruce lifts his head. There’s a smell on the air that he half-recognizes.

It smells like death.

“What is that?” Dr. Quinzel asks, sniffing.

“Mouse in the wall, maybe,” Ross suggests, knocking his knuckles into the wallpaper. Dr. Quinzel doesn’t seem convinced. They reach the door to Dr. Williams office and Dr. Quinzel knocks.

“Klaus?”

“Come in!” he calls. Dr. Quinzel pushes the door open and the three of them enter.

Dr. Klaus Williams is sitting at a metal desk, one hand on a cup of coffee. The windows look out onto the front lawn of Arkham, where a thick fog lies like cream. Old-fashioned medical equipment and other devices that Bruce doesn’t recognize sit on shelves behind him. The far end of the room is sectioned off with a curtain. There is a fireplace set in one wall, though the grate is cold.

“Bruce, this is Dr. Williams,” Dr. Quinzel says as Ross sits Bruce down in the chair in front of Dr. Williams.

“We met in the hall a few days ago,” Dr. Williams says with a smile. “It’s good to get a chance to meet you finally, Bruce.”

“I’ll see you in a few weeks,” Dr. Quinzel says, stepping back out the door.

“Bye, Harley,” Dr. Williams says warmly. Lightning cracks and illuminates the office for a second and the lights flicker briefly. “Drive safely in the storm.”

Dr. Quinzel waves and disappears down the hall. Ross follows her out. Dr. Williams laces his hands on the table and looks at Bruce.

“Well,” he says.

Bruce just studies him without answering. The man has a bristly red beard and is nearly balding on top. His eyes crinkle when he smiles.

“Dr. Quinzel has been keeping me informed on your progress.” Dr. Williams smiles serenely. “I think you have done impressively well in the time you’ve been here, but frankly I’m concerned at her leaving you at such a critical point in this juncture.”

He pushes back his rolling chair and stands up, moving over to his shelves. He opens a cupboard door and pulls something out. When he turns around, he’s holding a Batman mask. It is not Bruce’s own mask, he can tell, but it seems to be a close replica.

“Batman,” Dr. Williams says, looking down at the mask. “What a fascinating creation. I’ve never seen this sort of thing before, in all my years of working with troubled minds. Rather than confront your own problems—loss of your parents, an inability to finish your college education, a futile backpacking trip around to world to find yourself—you create this superhero, this idealized man who can battle all the world’s problems. Now your problems aren’t _problems_ —they’re _back story_.”

Bruce watches the man stare at the mask. Without the medication loosening his tongue, he feels no need to argue with the man. Dr. Williams seems to wait a minute for a response, then approaches him, holding the mask.

“Who are you?” Dr. Williams asks him, stopping in front of him.

Bruce doesn’t answer. Dr. Williams stretches the cowl in his hands and then pulls it down over Bruce’s head. Bruce grimaces, twisting his head to the side, but Dr. Williams firmly guides the mask down until it is in place on his head. He straightens the mask.

“Who are you?” Dr. Williams asks again patiently.

“Bruce Wayne,” Bruce says. “Who are you?”

“That’s not the voice you used. Show me that voice. Tell me who you are.”

Bruce glares at him. Dr. Williams frowns, touching the delicate skin under Bruce’s eye, which must be showing up pale without the black face paint to hide it. Bruce moves his head back out of the man’s reach, his eye twitching.

“You only see things in black and white when you wear this mask,” Dr. Williams says. “Good and bad, right and wrong, legal and illegal. It’s not healthy to see things that way. Everyone is a shade of gray. Even you.”

Lighting fills the room again. Bruce focuses out the window. It seems as if the fog that surrounds them has cut off the rest of the world, leaving them entirely alone. Thunder cracks after the lightning. The lamp on Dr. William’s desk quivers a little.

“You can’t be one whole person when you’re spending all your time playing such impossible parts,” Dr. Williams says, turning away from Bruce and rummaging around in another drawer. “You need to consolidate. You need to give up your other personalities.”

He turns back to Bruce, holding a long, thin cord.

“Batman needs to die,” he says.

Bruce sits up straight. Dr. Williams smiles at his reaction and steps forward. He delivers a powerful blow to Bruce’s face with his open palm.

“Who are you?” he asks.

Bruce shakes his head, pulling futilely at the straps holding his wrists to the chair. “You’re insane,” he says in horror.

Dr. Williams hits him again and then circles slowly around him. “Who are you?” he asks, out of sight.

“Get away from me!” Batman snarls, yanking on the arms of the chair.

“There’s the voice,” Dr. Williams says in pleasure. The cord drops around Batman’s neck and nestles up against his throat. “It’s good to meet you, Batman. Sorry to say our time together will be short.

The cord yanks taught, pulling up under Batman’s jaw. The cowl he’s wearing isn’t as tough as his own, but it redistributes enough of the force of the cord so that it doesn’t cut into his skin. It still restricts his blood flow, however. He lets his head snap back and then pulls forward hard, trying to yank the cord out of Dr. William’s hands, but Dr. Williams hangs on tenaciously.

“Batman isn’t perfect,” Dr. Williams says, twisting the cord. “Batman’s delusional. He thinks crime can be fought with assault and battery.”

“You—torture your—patients,” Batman rasps, his face tingling, his vision condensing down to a finger of light. “That’s a—crime—”

“It’s for your own good,” Dr. Williams whispers in his ear. “Go away now, Batman. Leave Bruce Wayne alone.”

The arm of the chair whines in protest at Batman’s struggles. The straps creak. Dr. Williams twists the cord again, tying it tighter.

“You’re not a hero,” Dr. Williams says. “You’re just a man. Give up.”

Batman struggles one last time and his vision goes completely. Dr. Williams’ voice fades away. He sags in his seat and the room goes away.

##

When Bruce opens his eyes, it feels like a million years have passed.

His head is throbbing and it hurts to swallow. He’s still sitting in his chair, strapped tightly in place. Dr. Williams is bent over something by the fireplace. A fire is blazing merrily in the grate.

Bruce takes in a breath and feels his eyes sink closed again. Dr. Williams stands and walks over.

“Bruce? Are you awake?”

Bruce forces his eyes open again and sees Dr. Williams smile.

“Batman is dead, Bruce,” he says, holding up the mask. “He’s gone.”

Bruce wets his lips, wincing as he swallows. Dr. Williams moves over to the fireplace.

“This is the last you’ll see of him,” he says, tossing the mask into the fire. The mask starts to smoke. Dr. Williams opens a window, letting in the humid air.

“He never really existed in the first place.” Dr. Williams takes a sedative from a tray and comes back to Bruce. “It’s okay to mourn. Just know that you’ll be stronger with him gone.”

##

Thunder is rumbling again.

Bruce tips up his face, feeling the rain settling on his face like a humid breath of air. He can feel it gathering and dripping down his bare skin. He opens his mouth and sucks in a breath. His throat hurts.

A fist pounds into his chest and he folds a little, shoulders hunching in. He sees condensation snap off his flesh, sees the glitter as it sparkles under the fluorescent lights. He hits the ground.

The thunder roars and it’s not thunder, it’s inmates. It’s not rain, either. From here he can see the ceiling of the showers, dripping down on him. The ladybugs swarm like welling blood. The Joker looks down at him.

“Get up,” the Joker says.

Bruce climbs unsteadily to his feet, like a child just learning to walk. His ears ring faintly, or maybe it’s the noise.

 _You’re not a hero_ , he thinks.

He barely gets his balance when the Joker knocks him down again effortlessly. The Joker doesn’t look happy. His mouth is drawn into a tight frown and his eyes are dark. Bruce searches out the pink burns on his chest and finds them.

 _What did Dr. Williams do to you?_ he wants to ask. _What part of you did he kill?_

Verrick is counting and the Joker is saying “Get up,” and Bruce obeys. The Joker waits this time, lets them circle for a minute, putting up some semblance of a balanced fight.

 _I can’t save anyone_ , Bruce thinks.

The Joker knocks him down again, and when Bruce lays on his back the Joker climbs on top of him, straddling his chest. He hits him once in the face, then leans in.

“He knows nothing about you,” the Joker says under the roar of the crowd. “He knows _nothing_.”

They get up again, the Joker bouncing back and up, Bruce taking longer. They circle dizzily. Bruce rubs his throat and swallows. _I never really existed at all._

“Why did you save me?” the Joker asks silently as they circle, his mouth moving. It’s too loud to hear the words but Bruce knows them.

He has no answer.

The Joker lunges and Bruce steps to the side, but he’s just not fast enough. He doesn’t have the kind of speed or strength he had before. Something’s missing. He falls to the ground and closes his eyes when he feels the Joker’s thighs clamp on his hips. The Joker’s breath ghosts across his face.

“It’s a cruel world,” the Joker says. “Being cruel is the only way to survive in it.”

Knuckles to his jaw. Bruce’s head snaps to the side. He sees the faces of the inmates watching, sees the guards passing money back and forth like it’s all in slow motion. The Joker touches a feather-light touch to his throat, probing the bruises.

“The room changed,” the Joker says. “That was how I escaped. The prison just wasn’t there anymore.”

Bruce turns his head and looks up at him. The Joker climbs to his feet, standing over him, his skin gleaming with the condensation. From this angle, his scars look like he’s smiling.

Verrick counts down and he’s out.


	10. Chapter 10

In the morning, the smell of death has taken over the ward.

It sinks into the food in the dining hall, tainting everything with a taste that can’t be avoided. It seeps into the books in the library, so every page turned wafts the scent up into the air. It turns the bed sheets damp and mists down onto the carpet. It saturates the air.

The medication has sunk its roots into Bruce’s brain again, holding on like a fist. He sits in the library, which is nearly the only room open now besides the cells and the showers. The laundries are closed. The dining hall stays open only long enough for meals. There isn’t enough staff left to manage the inmate employees.

There is a book open on the table in front of Bruce but he hasn’t been paying any attention to it. The medication won’t let him string the words together and he doesn’t even remember what the book is. He watches the other inmates instead, the ones who are trapped in here until the next passing time. They, too, move as if they’ve been drugged, and they probably have been. They’re all broken here, brains ticking off rhythm. That’s the reason they’re here.

“It’s coming in the vents,” someone says. Bruce sees Amos standing under one of the air vents, looking up. “The smell is coming in the vents.”

A couple other inmates gather around and look up. Bruce lets his gaze slide away. The paint on the cinderblock wall next to his chair is cracked in a long line from floor to ceiling. He looks up and tries to remember why that seems significant.

There is a crack of air and suddenly Amos lets out a shout. It’s more of an expulsion of air over his vocal cords than any actual word. He reels back, bumping into Bruce’s table. His body tips back and he crashes down, his head landing on Bruce’s book.

There is something sticking out of his face. Bruce sees the glass dome of a light bulb embedded in Amos’s eye socket. Inside of it, Amos’s startled eye stares straight up at the ceiling, like a ship in a bottle. The glass of the bulb is intact. Amos is dead.

The other inmates scatter in surprise. Bruce looks up to see a lamp hanging from the ceiling over a chair that Bruce could have sworn wasn’t there just a few minutes earlier.

Harding comes charging over from the doorway. “What’s going on here?”

Bruce pushes back his chair and stands up. Harding looks down at Amos, reaching down to his neck to find a pulse, then looks around at the circle of inmates.

“Who did this?” he demands.

Everyone stares at him. Harding turns in a slow circle, looking at each of them, then looks down at Amos again. It’s obvious to everyone that no one could have done this.

“Tell me how this happened!” Harding shouts.

Everyone stands in silence. The passing bell rings.

“None of you are leaving until you tell me how this happened,” Harding says. He turns on Bruce. “What happened here?”

“He was standing in the wrong place at the wrong time,” says one of the inmates sitting at a table behind Bruce. Harding glances over at him.

“What?”

“When it changed.” The inmate gives a shrug. “Two things can’t be in the same spot at once.”

Bruce turns his head and looks at the man. He doesn’t recognize the inmate. He’s an older man with graying hair and sagging skin. He doesn’t appear concerned with Harding’s scrutiny.

“What are you babbling about?” Harding asks in annoyance.

“It’s the same thing that’s been going on for weeks,” the inmate says. “Things shifting in ways they shouldn’t. Different universes intersecting with each other.”

Harding lets out a disgusted sound and turns away. “Okay, does someone else know what’s going on?”

Bruce slides his chair back and looks at the inmate. “What do you mean, different universes?”

The inmate gives him a long, hard look. “You’re Bruce Wayne, right? The one who killed Owens?”

“You knew him?” Bruce turns his back on Harding, who has gone on to question other inmates.

“He was an inmate in Arkham.” The inmate levels him a meaningful look. “Not your Arkham, though.”

“My Arkham?”

The inmate nods slowly. “There are an infinite number of Arkhams.” The inmate pauses to watch Bruce’s reaction.

Bruce is not a superstitious man. He doesn’t believe in ghosts or ghouls or God. He doesn’t, as a rule, believe in alternate universes. But there is very little that can explain the things he’s been seeing, beyond a mass delusion that is affecting every inmate here. Or indeed, a delusion that is affecting him so completely that he believes the other inmates are seeing these things as well. In any case, it doesn’t seem to do any harm to believe in alternate universes at this point.

“If we’re in two universes, how could I have killed him?”

The inmate shrugs. “You should never have even seen him, but something’s going on. I don’t know what exactly is causing it, but it seems to be getting worse. The universes are intersecting with each other. Bits of our universes are being transplanted into other ones, and vice versa. Mostly it seems to be just tiny changes—like that lamp that wasn’t there.” The inmate gestures to the light bulb in Amos’s eye. “When it switched—when the two universes intersected—Amos and the light bulb were in the same place at the same time. I’m surprised that hasn’t been happening more often.” The inmate smiles darkly. “It will get worse.”

“The ceiling in the dining hall? That was a different universe? What happened there?”

The inmate leans forward. “Think of it like this. One theory about alternate universes is that every time you make a choice, another universe is formed that would represent both possible outcomes of the choice. You come to a fork in the road and in one universe you went left, and in the other you went right.”

Bruce nods. “I’ve heard that before.”

“Right. Except that’s an extremely simplistic view of things. There aren’t just two choices. It’s not just you going left or right—it’s you not going anywhere, or your going up or down, or you dropping dead of an aneurysm where you stand. And it’s not just you. It’s not just all mankind, or all living things on Earth, or all living things in the solar system or the galaxy or the universe. It’s every _atom_.”

Another two guards come into the room to take Amos’s body away. Bruce digs his fingernails into his palm, trying to push the medication haze away long enough to understand.

The inmate continues. “Every electron that decides to move left or right is making a choice, and there are an infinite number of universes being created for each possible direction that each possible electron is taking. So we can have two universes that are absolutely identical except that one electron decided to go counterclockwise for one fraction of an instant. Or we have two universes that are completely identical except one oxygen molecule bonded with hydrogen instead of carbon.”

“We could be in that alternate universe and never know,” Bruce says.

“Exactly. But then we get into bigger differences: a universe where your father was wearing a blue shirt when you were born instead of a red one. Or one where you were born a woman. Or one where you’re a vicious criminal who has been terrorizing Gotham. Or one where life never evolved on this planet, or one where the sun has already gone supernova and swallowed the Earth, or one where the Earth never existed in the first place.” The inmate spreads his hands. “There are universes where the laws of physics are different, where people can speak telepathically and undead walk the earth and the sky is green.”

“How many of these universes are there?”

“I’m sorry, I’ve been misleading you. I say that there’s one universe where you’re a woman, but what I mean is that there’s an _infinite number_ where you’re a woman, except in each one there’s the slightest difference that we would never be able to detect. There are an infinite number of universes where we’re having this conversation right now, or a conversation very much like it. Heck, in an infinite number of universes, you’re giving this explanation to _me_.”

“How can you have an infinite number of each of those?”

“There is an infinite number of each of the infinite number of choices possible. That’s what infinity _means_. It’s possible that we’ve been shifting into other universes for a long time now and never knew it because there are an infinite number of universes that are indistinguishable from our own.”

Bruce frowns at him. “Then how are we seeing universes that are so different from ours? Like the ceiling? Or—or a pandemic ward in the library? If there are an infinite number of universes so close to ours we’d never know the difference, how have we gotten into these ones where we do see differences?”

The inmate looks pleased with Bruce’s grasp of the situation. “I think it’s almost like a pendulum. The universes nearest us are very similar to ours, but we’re swinging out in wider and wider arcs, touching on universes that are more and more different. We keep coming back to this familiar universe, but then we swing out again even further. I think it will keep getting worse. Right now it’s only affecting parts of Arkham, but soon it will spread to larger and larger areas.”

“What will happen?”

“I don’t think we want to be here when we shift into a universe where the sun has swallowed the earth,” the inmate says in a low voice.

“But how is this even happening?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what could cause us to pass into other universes. I spent my life forming theories but I never knew it was _possible_.”

Bruce looks down at the tabletop. “I think I saw Amadeus Arkham’s murdered daughter in the admin the other day. How is that possible? That happened ninety years ago.”

“There are universes where the Earth formed at a different time, so events that happened ninety years ago in this universe are happening right now in that one. Every moment in our history and future is happening simultaneous with us right now in some universe, as well as every moment in every possible history and future we could ever have.”

“How do I know that this isn’t just a delusion?” Bruce asks helplessly.

The inmate smiles. “Consider this: there are an infinite number of universes out there where this _really is_ just a delusion.”

Bruce presses his palm to the table, spreading out his fingers. It seems strange that he can touch a tabletop like this and feel it solid under his hand, when they could be moving through any number of universes right this very second. “Is there an universe where Batman is real?” he asks hollowly.

“An infinite number.” The inmate shrugs. “And an infinite number where he isn’t.”

##

When the next passing time comes, Bruce moves slowly down the hall to his cell. Most of the doors to the other rooms in the ward are locked, leaving him little else to do.

As he moves past the staircase to the showers and laundry room, the door opens and someone grabs his arm. Bruce startles, his reactions delayed. The Joker pulls him into the stairwell and lets the door swing shut.

“What happened to you?” the Joker hisses.

Bruce pulls out of the Joker’s grip. “What are you talking about?”

The two of them stare at each other. The stairway is buzzing and yellow with the old lights and humid air breathes up the steps from the showers and laundry room below. As if mindful of the security cameras on them, the Joker turns and moves down the steps. Bruce follows despite himself.

The showers are empty. The room seems larger without everyone in it for the fights. The floors glisten with water. There is a faint rust-colored stain around the drain on the floor.

“Those doctors hack away at anything they can’t understand,” the Joker says. “They don’t understand you.”

“And you do?” Bruce feels as if he has had this conversation before.

“There are only two of us,” the Joker says. “Everything else—” He waves a hand, sharply dismissive. “None of that matters. None of that exists. Without the two of us, there is nothing else. Good, evil, order, chaos, law, anarchy, Batman, Joker.”

“Batman is dead,” Bruce whispers.

“Batman is not dead!” the Joker roars. He swings at Bruce and the Bruce clumsily ducks away, catching the blow in his shoulder. He braces himself as the Joker slams into him, trying to force him over. Bruce shifts his weight and shoves the Joker away. They start to circle.

“Batman and the Joker are two sides of the same coin,” the Joker says. “ _I’m alive_. That means _you are too_.”

“What’s your name?” Bruce asks.

The Joker comes at him again, dropping low at the last second and kicking Bruce’s ankle wide. Bruce goes down on one knee and catches the Joker’s foot, throwing the Joker to the side. The Joker lands on one hip and slams his foot back into Bruce’s gut, knocking him over. Bruce scrambles to his feet again as the Joker does.

 _Who are you?_ Dr. Quinzel asks in his head.

“Batman is dead,” Bruce says. “Bruce Wayne is dead.”

“Then what about me?” the Joker demands.

“What’s your name?”

The Joker doesn’t answer.

They circle. In clothes, it’s different. The swish and slide of fabric on Bruce’s skin is disconcerting now, as is the silence. He can hear the slick noise of the Joker’s footsteps on the tile, hear the huff of his breath.

“I know what’s going on,” Bruce says. “I don’t know how to fix it, but I know we’re not crazy.”

When the Joker darts forward again, Bruce is expecting it. Bruce shunts the Joker’s weight to the side and twists free of the Joker’s grip. The Joker bounces back up and slams into him, his hands clamping on Bruce’s forearms. They hit the floor again and roll. When they stop, the Joker is on top.

The Joker leans down, his hair hanging in a curtain on either side of Bruce’s face, blocking them out from the rest of the room.

“We were never crazy,” the Joker whispers.

Bruce lifts his head without thinking and pushes his mouth against the Joker’s. The Joker pulls back, sitting straight up and looking down at him. Bruce lies on his back and looks up at him, blinking in the fluorescent lights.

The room is very still.

The Joker puts his hands on Bruce’s shoulders and then leans down. His lips brush Bruce’s. Bruce starts to lift his hands and the Joker shifts to pin them down.

The touch of his lips is like a shock running through Bruce’s body, narrowing the world down to the two of them. He can’t remember a kiss being like this before. It doesn’t matter that the Joker is a man. He isn’t attracted to male or female, just this nameless creature straddling him, running his tongue alongside the inside of Bruce’s lip.

Bruce tries to lift his hands again and the Joker doesn’t let him so Bruce rolls them both over, pinning the Joker to the floor. He pushes his knee between the Joker’s thighs and the Joker bites him on the lip, still holding onto Bruce’s hands tightly.

Bruce twists his head to the side, pulling his lip free. The Joker lets him go without injury. Bruce is dizzyingly aroused, his skin burning where the Joker is touching him. He pushes his knee again and the Joker lets him this time, his thighs falling apart, his flesh hot under Bruce, or maybe that’s Bruce’s heat transferring into him, or maybe they’re both burning up together.

 _Two halves of the same coin_ , Bruce thinks, tonguing circles over the Joker’s scars. Good, bad, right, wrong. _If Batman’s gone, who are_ you?

Fabric gives under the Joker’s hands, and then the Joker has a hold of him, and if Bruce thought the kiss was a shock, this is an electrocution. He pushes his hand down the front of the Joker’s pants and finds him equally hard. Their hips are moving together and the Joker is breathing fast and shallow against his neck and Bruce can’t tell where he ends and the Joker begins and it doesn’t matter.


	11. Chapter 11

Mid-morning the next day, Bruce hears the sound of a jet engine in the hallway outside his cell.

He struggles out of his cot and makes his way to the door. It is not, in fact, a jet engine in the hallway (though at this point it wouldn’t really be that much of a surprise) but there is black smoke crawling across the ceiling, He smells burning. He can’t get enough of a view to see the door at the end of the cellblock but the smoke seems to be coming from that direction. The sound of the fire is incredibly loud—wherever it is, it must be an inferno.

For a second he thinks of the inmate yesterday ( _I don’t think we want to be here when we shift into a universe where the sun has swallowed the earth_ ) but no, that couldn’t be it. They would be gone if that were the case. This is just a fire.

Up and down the cell block, inmates start banging on the doors in sharp, desperate slaps.

“Let me out!” someone shouts from the cell next to Bruce’s, voice already cracking with the smoke.

There doesn’t seem to be any answer. Bruce coughs in the smoke and crouches down on the floor. The air temperature is rising. The smoke is coming in the eye-slit on the door.

Could they have shifted into a universe where Arkham is burning down? Could it just be a regular fire? Where is the staff? Bruce has never really thought about the fire evacuation procedure for a maximum-security insane asylum before but there has to be one. If they can all make it out to the fenced-in recreation yard, they’ll be safe.

The lights flicker and go out. Red emergency lights come on in the hallway, filtering dimly through the smoke. The shouts are sounding more panicked now. Someone is coughing.

The smoke curls across the ceiling of Bruce’s cell. There is no window. The door is metal. The walls and floor are tile covering reinforced cinderblock. The room itself won’t burn, but that’s little comfort. The smoke will get them first, if the fire doesn’t take out the support beams of the asylum and send the whole thing crashing down.

Bruce grabs the sheets from his bed, crumples them up and shoves them in the eye-slit and underneath the door, blocking out the smoke and the light, leaving himself entirely in darkness. He bangs his fist on the door, hearing it echo hollowly.

The Joker is in a cell closer to the smoke. Bruce bangs harder on the door, feeling a surge of panic. Yesterday, pinning the Joker underneath him, he had felt the pulse of the man, the fragile flesh of him, and now he doesn’t want to see that burn.

The smell of smoke suddenly increases. Bruce lifts his head. He can’t see anything but it must be coming out of the ventilation grate over the cot. He grabs another sheet and leaps up onto his cot. The air by the ceiling is boiling hot and he shuts streaming eyes as he holds the sheet against the grate. It tastes like napalm in the back of his throat. It’s too much. He ducks down again, coughing. He staggers to the sink and wets a section of sheet, then wraps it around his face.

There is a loud, buzzing clank and then his door swings open, letting in a flood of smoke and some dim light. Bruce leaps off the bed and runs to it. All down the hall, doors are opening. Someone must have hit the switch to let them out. He staggers into the hall and ducks down again. It is too hot to stand, and the paint on the ceiling is beginning to ignite. There are inmates coming out of their cells all up and down the hall. No one is coming out of the Joker’s cell.

Inmates push past him, heading to the end of the hall and out of sight. Bruce struggles through and reaches the Joker’s cell. He squints in, rubbing his eyes. The cell is empty. He must be in a session with Dr. Williams, Bruce realizes.

All at once, the noise ceases, leaving Bruce’s ears ringing. He stays crouched next to the Joker’s cell door, looking towards the door where the fire was. His breath rasps in his throat and his heart is pounding. Smoke continues to drift across the ceiling but new smoke isn’t coming in.

There’s a crack in the paint on the wall around the door. Bruce straightens up and moves carefully to the door, dropping the damp sheet. He reaches out, his hand hovering over the door handle. It is cool.

Bruce makes the connection in his head. The crack in the paint is the border of where the universe shifted. The asylum on the other side of this door shifted into a different universe that didn’t quite line up correctly with this one. That’s why there was a crack outside of the dining hall after the incident with the ceiling, and a crack in the library after Amos died.

He pushes the door open. On the other side of the door is a normal hallway, bathed in the red of the emergency lights. The inmates have all evacuated the hall behind him, heading out to the recreation yard. Bruce sends one last glance back and then steps through.

He’s not sure what exactly he’s looking for, but he wants to find the Joker. It’s weird to think that things will make more sense if the Joker is here, but the Joker has been the only one in Arkham so far to anchor him in reality.

The ragged remains of smoke drift around the emergency lights. The linoleum floor is cool under Bruce’s bare feet. He stops at a locked nurses’ station and listens. The emergency lights buzz faintly. He should hear the inmates evacuating, or perhaps guards moving around the prison, but he can’t hear anyone at all.

Down the hall, something crunches. Bruce steps away from the nurses’ station and turns his head. On the floor again the wall is a black, gnarled sculpture, like a giant cockroach with its legs curled in on itself.

Bruce steps closer. There is a smell of burnt flesh lingering in the air. Another step, and he realizes it’s a human body.

It has been burned so severely that Bruce can’t tell who it is. The skull is a blackened cinder, the lips pulled back into a rictus. The limbs are all curled in on themselves. It is wearing what could be the remains of a guard uniform.

Bruce reaches out and lightly touches the skull. It collapses in on itself, exhaling the black smoke of ashes. He withdraws his hand, wiping blackened fingers on the leg of his pants. He doesn’t know which guard it was, but his heart aches anyway. The man was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It could have been Bruce.

He stands up and then turns away, hurrying down the hall. The doors to the dining hall pass on his right. The small windows set in the door show featureless black and he hesitates, remembering the windows in the dining hall, knowing that the room should be lit. It’s mid-morning. He doesn’t have time to investigate.

The library doors loom ahead of him, and when Bruce pushes them open, the smell comes out of the room in a gush of humid air, hitting him in the face. The room is lined with cots again, but this time the beds are all empty, the sheets stained and crumpled. Flies rise and settle again on a bloodstain.

Bruce tentatively steps into the room, letting the doors swing shut behind him. The floor is slick with condensation under his feet. There is a slow drip somewhere, a bright plink of noise in the dead quiet of the room. Bruce takes in a shallow breath and walks down the aisle between the cots.

One of the cots isn’t empty. The body is crusted over with smallpox like a second skin. Bruce averts his eyes and continues on.

He reaches the door at the other end of the room and pushes it open. On the other side of the door is the hallway that leads toward the admin. The air is dead still, smelling faintly of burnt pork.

The first stairwell is dark, lit only by the emergency lights. There is a strange tangle of darkness on the stairs, and after a moment he realizes that it’s a snarl of wheelchairs filling the stairwell, piled on top of each other. He moves to the side of the stairs and then pulls on one wheelchair until it comes free. It takes a moment and then the rest follow, spilling down the stairs in a cascade. They smash into the double doors at the bottom of the stairs in a cacophony of squealing metal that echoes up the stairwell. Bruce waits a second, listening as the echoes die down. There are no shouts of discovery or alarm.

The next hallway, passing along the edge of Ward C, has windows. The light is a dark, yellowish gray and the bottoms of the clouds nearly touch the top of the building. Bruce wonders if perhaps the weather is having the same problem as the walls of Arkham—displaced air not quite matching up, temperature differences causing unstable weather. White mist surrounds the property, blocking out the rest of the world. The windowpane rattles with a distant clap of thunder.

On the other side of the hallway, frosted glass panels separate the hall from the ward. He can see the shadow of an IV pole against the glass. No one seems to be in the ward. Perhaps they evacuated with the fire, or maybe Bruce isn’t anywhere near people anymore.

He reaches the next stairwell and climbs. When he pushes open the door to the Ward B hallway, he squints. The white mist is pressing against the windows. There is an abandoned wheelchair in the middle of the hallway. Some of the panes of glass are cracked. One has shattered completely. Bruce puts his fingers into the tiny holes in the mesh covering the window and feels a humid breeze blow across his face.

Something moves in the corner of his vision and he turns. In the frosted glass panels across the hallway, a figure stands silhouetted. Bruce freezes.

The figure has bat wings.

 _Is there a universe where Batman is real?_

Bruce lets his breath out slowly, his heart thudding in his chest. The bat shadow moves across the glass. Its wings flicker in ways that make something twist in Bruce’s gut, the old fear coming back, clenching inside of his ribcage. On the other side of the window, the figure picks up a chair.

Bruce is running for the stairs before the chair even crashes through the glass. He hits the stairwell door and sprints up the steps without stopping, taking the steps two at a time. At the top of the stairs, he pushes open the second set of doors and bursts out into the hallway of Ward A.

This hallway is carpeted with glass from the broken windows on both sides. Not a pane stands intact. The mist has come into the hallway, nearly obscuring the far door to the last stairwell. He hears something roar in the stairwell behind him and he ignores the glass, running over it in bare feet. He thinks of Owens, coming at him with a piece of broken glass, “B-Bat—” and if this was the evil spirit Owens thought he was attacking, Bruce has nothing but respect for the man.

Something stabs into the bottom of his left foot and he falters, clutching at his foot with his hands. There is glass embedded in his heel. He pulls it out, feeling blood spill over his fingers.

He drops the glass and runs for the final set of stairs, leaving a trail of red footprints behind himself. The stairs stick to his feet. He reaches the top and pushes open the doors, then comes to a dead stop, his back against the door, his feet leaving smears of red on the floor.

The Joker is standing in the middle of the foyer, one foot planted on either side of the body on the floor. A knife is bare in his hand and he is red up to the elbows. He raises his head when Bruce appears and smiles.

There isn’t much left of Dr. Williams. His gut is open and his entrails have spilled out onto the floor. His neck gapes. His face has slid off his skull. Bruce can smell the ruptured stink of bowels.

“I knew you’d come,” the Joker says.

Bruce looks down at the body and, for the moment, he can’t feel horror. He feels, in a way, relief. He glances up at the Joker, who is watching him, waiting for some sort of reaction.

“We have to stop what’s happening,” Bruce says instead.

The Joker glances over his shoulder, looking around the foyer. Bruce follows his gaze and for the first time he notices that things are changing—chairs sliding in and out of place, paintings flickering on the wall.

“Why?” the Joker asks. He drops down to his knees, straddling the doctor’s chest, and pushes his knife between the man’s teeth. The corpse shifts briefly into a stranger, then back to the doctor.

Bruce steps unsteadily forward, feeling the floor changing under his feet. “It’s getting worse. We’re—we’re passing through other universes, and if we pass through one that’s too different from our own, everyone will die. There must be some sort of—device or trigger or something—”

The Joker pauses, the hilt of his knife tapping against the teeth of the corpse. “So?”

“It will _swallow the world_.”

“And why should I care? The world deserves it after everything it’s done to us.” The Joker lets go of the knife and stands up. “Isn’t that the best joke ever? Knowing what’s going on, and letting the world die anyway?”

“We can’t let that happen.”

“I thought you weren’t a hero anymore.” The Joker smiles, his eyes squinting. Even he seems to be shifting—hair blond, then green, then purple. For a fraction of a second, he has no scars.

Bruce steps forward again, right up to the corpse, reaching out a hand. “This isn’t heroism. This is survival.”

The Joker looks down at the hand. “What makes you think I want to survive?”

A groan of tortured wood cuts through the air and something crashes down to the floor to their right, cracking the floorboards. Part of the ceiling has collapsed, no longer able to sustain itself under the constant change. Bruce ducks falling debris as more of the ceiling cracks.

“We need to—” he starts to shout over the cacophony, but the Joker is gone as if he never existed. The floor bucks under Bruce’s feet and he sprawls.

A vase falls to the floor and shatters and a dollhouse pops into existence next to Bruce’s elbow. The incredible smell of death that has been plaguing the asylum for days suddenly buries itself in Bruce’s lungs and he gags, scrambling back up to his feet.

The corpse on the floor is no longer the doctor. It’s now a little girl. Beside her is another corpse, an older woman missing a head. Bruce turns his head unwillingly to the dollhouse, remembering what Dr. Quinzel had said. Dead eyes stare back at him.

“Amadeus Arkham spent months trying to find a way to bring his wife and daughter back from the dead.” Dr. Quinzel had told him. Magic. Time travel. _Alternate universes._

He was successful, Bruce realizes in wonder. He found a way. Except there are an infinite number of universes where his family _still died._

It must have driven him insane.

The floor bucks again and this time it cracks along a fault line. The little girl corpse tumbles inside, falling into darkness. Bruce flings himself away from the gap, covering his face from the smell.

Arkham must have created some sort of device to bring himself into an alternate universe. Whether that device has been accidentally switched on, or whether it’s malfunctioning, or whether its battery is dying, it doesn’t matter. The important thing is that it _must be in this building._

Bruce turns for the staircase leading to the second floor. For the moment, he seems to be in what used to be the family home. There isn’t much time left before they shift out of it. He breaks into a run.

##

It’s too fast to stop now.

Bruce stumbles down a hall, blindly throwing himself forward. He just has to trust that the hallway is there ahead of him, and that’s the joke in all of this—there is _no reason_ to think it will be. What are the odds now?

They’ve shifted out of all the normal places, all the “one electron slightly to the left” places, all the “my father’s shirt was blue instead of red the day I was born” places, and now they’re in the wild swings, from “humans never evolved” to “binary star system” to “gravity is motherfucking _double_ ” and Bruce can feel the missing spaces in between, the universes where Bruce Wayne never existed (and there are an _infinite number_ of universes where Bruce Wayne never existed).

He is flickering in and out like a radio station that’s just going out of range, and sometimes there is another thing there to take his place, and sometimes it’s just empty air.

The air goes out of his lungs all at once and for one brief second he is hurtling through nothing, true void. His eyes scream and he slams his palms down over them, all the moisture sublimating from his mouth, and then he’s crashing to his knees on a linoleum tiled hallway that’s frosted with cold but it’s _there_ , and solid, and there is air in his lungs again. His first breath sears. His eyes water behind his palms.

It’s getting worse. That was a bad one, so truly bad that he can’t think about it. They’re running out of time.

He isn’t going to make it.

He has to trust that the Joker is ahead of him, that the Joker will see _reason_ , that the Joker will _save the world_ —

Bruce lets out a sharp bark of a laugh, startling himself. The Joker. See reason.

There is no hope.

The world shifts again.

##

Nothing. He can’t find anything.

The rooms here are multiplying and bifurcating and rearranging themselves too fast to be checked. He charges down hallways that turn into rooms and rooms that turn into staircases and staircases that turn into dead ends. Sometimes, he is in the Arkham family home. Sometimes he is in the asylum. In one memorable instance he catches a glimpse of empty air before the floor reappears under his feet.

He can’t imagine what the device might look like but he has to trust that he’ll know it when he sees it. Things shudder in and out of existence and Bruce battles his way through the nausea of not knowing whether the air is going to be there when he next takes a breath.

Where would Arkham keep such a thing? Where could it have stayed through all these years? A secret room? A storage place in the attic? Bruce had never seen any sort of display of turn-of-the-century artifacts in the—

Bruce freezes in place, his mind flashing back to his session in Dr. Williams’ office. The doctor sitting at his desk, with _old-fashioned medical equipment and other devices on the shelves behind him—_

The device is downstairs.

He’s halfway down what might be the second floor hallway when he hears a guttural roar. Footsteps slam the floor behind him and Bruce whirls around.

The bat is there, its teeth bared. There is no man inside that mask. There is no mask. It’s just bat, and it launches itself at him.

Bruce dives out of the way but the bat hits him, a heavy human weight. Bruce kicks up, using the momentum and lifting his legs to force the bat off of him.

Everything is flickering around them, the floor changing from wood to marble to tile to cement to dirt, so fast it’s a blur. The walls are shifting around them and furniture comes and goes. The bat comes at him again and it’s solid. When it hits him, its fingers curl around his throat and tighten. Bruce flails out and his hand hits a shard of broken glass from a lighting fixture. He closes his fingers over it and slashes at the bat on top of him. The glass scrapes over armor plating.

His vision is going. He slams the glass desperately again and again against the armor, trying to find a weak spot. He’s going to die. The bat is going to kill him. He will never save the world in time.

 _Bruce, don’t be afraid_ , his father whispers in his ear.

Bruce crams the glass into a join between two plates of armor, his eyes rolling back in his head.

 _To conquer fear, you must become fear_ , Ra’s al Ghul says.

Bruce closes his eyes, the last of his air huffing out between his teeth.

 _Okay_ , he thinks. His hand drops numbly to the floor and his fingers open. The piece of glass rolls out of them. He lets his muscles release.

Air rushes into his lungs. The weight lifts off his chest. Bruce opens his eyes. The bat is gone. A mask lies on his chest. Bruce takes hold of it in both hands and looks into the empty eyeholes.

There are an infinite number of universes where Batman exists.

There are an infinite number where he doesn’t.

He rolls to his knees and gets to his feet, pulling the mask over his head. He doesn’t have time to think about that. He has a world to save.

##

The Joker is sitting cross-legged on Dr. William’s desk, his elbows resting on his knees. In his hands is a small wooden box with brass dials and antennae and ornate scrollwork. It is exactly how you would expect a turn-of-the-century alternate reality phase oscillator to look.

“The world’s cruel joke was creating the two of us,” the Joker says when Bruce stops in the doorway, as if he’s been waiting for Bruce to arrive.

“You want revenge?” Bruce asks quietly.

“A world that created us doesn’t deserve to exist.” The Joker’s eyes are fixed on the box, his mouth pressed into a thin line. The box seems to be the only constant in the room, so solid and real that it’s almost hard to look at. The Joker’s hands shift and remold around it.

“The world didn’t create us,” Bruce replies. The Joker looks up at him, unsmiling. Bruce meets his gaze steadily. “We’re creating the world with every choice we make.”

Even as he says it, he knows it absolutely to be true. Ra’s al Ghul, Rachel, Harvey, Owens, every death he’s ever caused, directly or not, has been due to a choice he’s made. He can’t deny it anymore, or try to cling onto some ideal. What happened has happened. There is no changing it. He needs to grow up.

“I choose to let the world die,” the Joker says.

Bruce steps forward and the Joker recoils, holding the box to his chest. It won’t be much longer now before they shift into some impossible world that will destroy them both.

“The man who made that device wanted to change the past,” Bruce says. “He couldn’t deal with what had happened to him.”

“Life is cruel,” the Joker spits, curling around the box as if it’s causing him pain.

“Life is _not_ cruel. Life just _is_. We’re not _better_ than everyone else. We’re just _people_.” Bruce stops and takes a breath. The Joker is still looking at him, his eyes narrow.

“I saved you on that rooftop,” Bruce says finally, letting out his breath. “It wasn’t because it was the right thing to do.”

The Joker is silent, watching him.

“It wasn’t because I was trying to prove a point.”

Bruce steps forward and this time the Joker doesn’t move.

“It was because I couldn’t imagine a world where you didn’t exist.”

The Joker’s lips part briefly but he doesn’t say a word. Bruce closes the distance between them and for a second his lips are touching a thousand Jokers, a million, a billion, but the man is solid against him and the kiss is desperate and warm and real.

The Joker lets go of the box. Bruce takes it and lets it drop to the floor. There is a crack that is far too loud to be from that small thing hitting the floor. It ripples through him, raising goosebumps on his skin. The Joker shudders against him, but they don’t draw apart from each other.

There are footsteps in the hall behind him, people rushing around in a panic.

Sunlight falls over the desk.

Bruce closes his eyes.


End file.
